Princess told me I really needed to clean up the dog poop in the back yard. I should explain, our dog Cappy (short for Cappuccino) is rather small. He only weighs about 32 pounds. As a relative lightweight, his production of “fertilizer” in not that great. Most of his production is reserved, in fact, for the “doggie areas” of the nearby park.
There he and I can be found, once or twice a day, while he investigates whatever odors he finds the most significant and important, whilst raising his leg occasionally to leave a “P-Mail” for the next pooch that happens to pass by.
Not so the neighbors pups. “Bob” and “Sally” (names changed to avoid potential lawsuits) were, for a while, welcome visitors to our back yard. Seems the previous owners had a gate installed between the yards, the better to visit back and forth. When we tore down our pool, the gate was rediscovered, and, as we were becoming quite friendly with the folks next door, it was cleared and opened. Well, the three dogs formed a friendship, to the point where they would beg treats from each other’s pet humans. However, they also decided that our yard represented “virgin territory”.
Now “Sally” decided she liked lying on Princess’ flowers and digging in the rose bushes, which did not exactly enamor her with the Darling Wife. That was quite bad enough, but the worst was yet to come. And come it did, from “Bob”, in truly prodigious amounts. You see, “Bob” decided that he had a new toilet. And, while he was not all that much bigger than Cappy, his output would make a buffalo moan with envy. He created new meaning for the term “full of s***”, giving it a depth and breadth of meaning never before considered or analyzed.
Enter the Princess. Ah, the righteous anger of the royal darling, the Queen of my heart! First, was a Prelude, an Overture to the Symphony, the tender notes of complaint about the damage being done to the flowers. They were in the springtime of their lives, waiting to blossom forth and, with the magnetic calling power evidenced by same, call to our yard the butterflies and the hummingbirds, two welcome summer patrons of the delights of our garden. But the flowers were having their future shortened out of existence by “Sally” and her habit of dropping where she chose, without regard for what lay below her.
Then the First Movement of the Symphony proper, wherein we are introduced to what “Sally” is doing to the roses and what might lie in store in the future, should her depredations continue. The damage must be undone, and steps needed to be taken to ensure that such horrors would not re-occur in the future. The roses were a project, a Work in Progress, a Masterful Mix of roses large and small in variegated hues, to delight the eye with colorful beauty and to delight the nose with the soft perfume that full glorious bloom can bring. Fie on the Scoundrel, the Wastrel who would dare to do harm to them! Somehow, I was being led to feel that the entire problem was being laid at my feet because I was in some manner as yet unknown to me the guilty party.
The Second Movement followed, and here is where the issue of “Bob’s” “issue” was brought forth in the glorious segue for which the Princess is famous, and the shift from flower damage to mountains of poop occurs in a flash, leaving me stunned, nay, stupefied, by the brilliance of it all. To here the Princess tell it, our very backyard was being transformed more and more into terrain reminiscent of the Himalayas, with only a Sherpa or two and a brown furred Yeti wandering amongst the mountains of dogpoop to complete the illusion and bring it to fruition. Ah, Sir Edmund Hillary, Where Art Thou? I stand amazed, thinking that perhaps all is finished, pondering what can be said in response to what has been played for me.
Not so. The Third and Final Movement commences, whereupon I find that I am to concern myself with the total removal of every cubic mile of dogpoop in the mountainous terrain that once was my humble back yard. But there is a way out. For with the cunning of my Sicilian forebears, assisted by a speech from none other than the President of these United States of America, I am rescued from a life cut short by daily toil and labor in the “Fields of Poopy”. For all time, my dilemma will be erased, obviated, eliminated. Poop will be in my past and violets will be in my future, for a path from perdition to freedom has been opened for me by the President!
God bless the man. He has followed in the footsteps of the brilliant and ingenious William Jefferson Clinton and saved me and all the men in the world from EVER having to deal with a dirty job again. To quote Clinton,
"It depends on what the meaning of the words ‘is’ is.” –Bill Clinton, during his 1998 grand jury testimony on the Monica Lewinsky affair
“It depends on how you define alone…” –Bill Clinton, in his grand jury testimony
Then the whole thing gets reinforced when President Bush reports to the American public during a speech that what is being pushed in the United States Senate is not amnesty. Well, if Clinton can’t define “is” or “alone” and Bush doesn’t know what “amnesty” is, it stands to reason that Princess is totally mistaken about what comprises “dogpoop”. In fact, I’ve decided that what is piled up in various places in my back yard, is not dogpoop at all, just large, brown, steaming piles of amnesty.
And frankly, dear reader, if you’re foolish enough to take the side of Princess on this matter, well, it’s obvious to me that you’re full of amnesty, too.
Copyright June 1, 2007, by Dave Hoffman. Use granted to all who note that this article originally appeared at Capitol Hill Coffee House, and provide link to same. (And that ain’t no amnesty.)
Dave is a Capitol Hill Coffee House staff writer.
