When he does poop on naked asphalt or concrete, I bag it as any dog owner should. This is not universal among my neighbors, though, as the Cuje and I discovered few days ago. A much larger dog had done his job right in front of the community mailboxes, and his or her owner had just left the poop chunks lie in that well-trafficked spot.
It was almost inevitable that someone would step in them, as my neighborhood is populated by old people whose sight and smell has deteriorated, and nothing excites them more than getting mail. They stampede the boxes the minute the mail person has finished stuffing them. One of them was going to get dog doo on their shoes.
I was going to pick up the specimens myself, but then I noticed someone else had already seen the offending load. They did not pick it up, but strove to warn the neighborhood by sprinkling glitter all over it.
I found myself failing to appreciate the thoughtfulness of this gesture, however. It would have been just as easy to go get a bag and remove the dog dirt as to return with glitter with which to decorate it. Unless of course you customarily carried glitter on your person, which would mean you were a stripper. None of my neighbors look like strippers, which I regard as one of the disadvantages of bunking here, but moving to a location where more strippers lived would be a hard sell to my Significant Other.
The glitter had been applied hastily—much of it had missed its intended targets and lay on the concrete around it. It was a generous handful, though, thrown by someone with an ample supply of the sparkly stuff. An arts and crafty person. Many of my neighbors look like they might be the type to spend hours with glue, yarn, glitter and tinsel, making clever handmade things. These people I generally admire, because I know I would last about two minutes at crafting before dumping all my supplies in the trash and going out for a beer.
Or was this a salute to the season? Did someone, after putting up a tree and stringing lights across their porch, and, still not weary from their decorating labors, say to themselves “Let’s spruce up that dog shit over there, too. After all, it’s Christmas.”
All of these glitter-and-poo thoughts ran through my head, but Cujo was thinking about something else entirely. Inspired, he pooped right next to his predecessors’ pile, beneath the mailbox post.
And as long as I had the bag out anyway…