What Can I Do?

It's Sunday morning.
     I'm sitting outside drinking my second cup of coffee. I've already read the Sunday newspaper. Twice. Well, not really. I've already read the Sunday newspaper twice, except for the front page section.
     My Dad is inside sitting at the kitchen table finishing his breakfast. He's got a healthy appetite, but he eats slowly. Very slowly. It's not that he's some kind of half-human/half-turtle hybrid. He'll move fast enough if I drop a twenty on the floor. He'll pick it up and say it's his with a speed The Flash would envy.
     No, I think he's eats slow because he has the whole day ahead of him with nothing to do, so he figures, "What's the rush?"
     He's already read the front page, and it sits to his right. Next to his plate. He's got his elbow on the paper. Just enough of his elbow to let the world know that it's his.
     Like my twenty
     Have I ever told you about my dogs? I've got two. Well, one, really. One's my dad's and the other one's mine. Mine is the big one. He's big and goofy and he has a lot of heart. My Dad's is the small one. It does nothing but bark.
     And stink up the house.
     Anyway, my big dog has a small plastic chew toy that it loves. The small one could not care less about that chew toy. That is, until the big one has it. And then the small one makes it his life's purpose to take the chew toy away from the big one.
     Like I said, the big one has a good heart, so it tolerates the smaller one when it finally manages to snatch the toy away from him. Sometimes the smaller one will snatch the toy right out of the big one's mouth. A mouth, I might add, that could crush the smaller one's spine into powder with very little effort, if he was so incline.
     But he's not inclined.
     What the smaller one does, since it has no interest in the chew toy, is it will walk over to it's favorite square of carpet and lay down, the chew toy placed carefully by his side. If the big one comes close, the little one will growl. If the big one gets too close, the little one will bare his teeth. If the big one makes a move for the toy, the little one will snap. Why my Dad's dog likes to go through such measures to keep that chew toy--the one it cares nothing about--away from my dog, well, who knows why a dog does what dog does?
     My dog has to wait until the little one finally gets tired of protecting a toy it doesn't want and walks away from it before he can reclaim it. It's the same with food. We have to serve the two dogs in two separate bowls, because the little one can't guard two bowls of food at the same time.
     My Dad is like his dog. He'll sit at the breakfast table, with his elbow on that newspaper until he finally gets tired of guarding a newspaper he's already read. I don't know why he does it, or if he does it on purpose, but he does it. My Dad does what my Dad does and that's that.
     By the time he gets up and leaves, I'm already on to other things. Maybe I'll have a chance to read it later, most times I don't. It doesn't matter. There will be more bad news tomorrow. But since I brought up my Dad's little dog...
     It seems like I have to bathe that little barking machine every week. The dog smells like shit. I mean, literally. It smells like shit. I'm surprised the Haz-Mat team from OSHA don't arrive at my front door.
     I thought maybe because the dog is taken for a walk every morning that it was always stepping in something or it was just the dog's natural body odor. You've known people like that, I'm sure. People who have a certain aroma through no fault of their own. The aroma of bacon comes to mind.

     So I have to bathe that dog almost every week and wash his butt with sandpaper (not really), making sure he's clean, but a week later, the dog smells like shit again.
     Today, like I said, I'm outside enjoying my coffee. My Dad finally gets around to taking his little stinker for a walk, and my wife brings me some home-baked cookies made from scratch. She also brings me the front page.
     I guess I'll keep her.
     It's one of those mornings where I have no plans and nothing to do, so I'm able to pretend I'm my Dad and take my time reading what's wrong with the world. When I'm done, just as I put the newspaper down, my Dad gets back from his walk.

      My Dad, not really talking to anyone in particular, especially me, says out loud, "Boy o' boy, this dog really had to go, lots of poop." I'm surprised that information didn't make the front page.
     He then takes the towel he uses to wipe his sweaty face with and wipes the dog's butt with it. I've never seen anyone do that before. And then, with the same towel, my Dad wipes the dog all over. Now, I've really never seen anyone do that before. No wonder the poor dog smells like shit. He's cleaning the dog's butt after it poops, and then wipes the shit all over the dog.
     I guess he thinks the dog sweats or something, and needs to be wiped off like it's just been working out in a gym. But a dog sweats with its tongue, not with various sweat glands like a human. Which begs the question: If a dog sweats with its tongue, then what are its armpits for? Anyway...
     I mention this later to my wife, and she tells me, "Oh, yeah, he does that after every walk."
     And nobody thought to tell me before now? I had to witness it for myself? I had almost hired Thomas Magnum and his black buddy who flies a helicopter to solve the case of the shitty-smelling dog, and it turns out there was a conspiracy to keep that information from the poor guy who was bathing the poor dog every other week?
     "And you don't find that odd?" I ask her.
     "Sure, I find that odd," she tells me, "but what can I do about it?"
     She's got a point.
     I think that maybe I should ask my Dad about it, but do I really want to sit through whatever explanation he's going to come up with? He won't have an explanation that I or Charlie Manson would find reasonable, but he'll have an explanation. And that explanation will end up taking longer than I'll care to sit and listen to.
     So, like my wife says, what can I do?
     Nothing.
     But bath the dog more often.

 
 

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