10,000 Poops

I was thinking the other day, as I was helping my 13-year old dog into the back seat of the car--what it will be like when Calvin passes away.  Will I be replacing him with another dog.  Calvin was the replacement for my previous dog named “Cat” that lived about 14 or 15 years.  Both rescue dogs, medium sized, a little crazy, but good NYC pets that learned to travel on weekends upstate without throwing-up or shedding too much in the car. 

It has been about 30 years straight having a dog in my life, a companion unlike my wife or children.  A love and a relationship that is unique in this world.   With kids, we feed them and clean their poop for the first few years of their lives, and when trained, the diapers come off and they spend the rest of their lives hopefully going to the bathroom in a toilet.   But dogs, especially those urban canines, need to be trained to be walked outside, taken to the curb and pee and shit on the street.  Then one takes a colorful plastic bag with usually a design of a paw print off the roll of these pooper bags, and you grab the crap, reverse twist it, and head to the nearest trash can on the street, generally filled with other multi color poop bags.  

Every morning, like clockwork, I do this walk, saying hello to the fellow dog walkers doing their routine.   When you add it up, if I picked up one poop a day for 30 years, that is 365 x 30, or almost 11,000.  Subtract those wonderful days in the country you just open the door and let the dog have its way in the grass or when we travel and the pet sitter does it. So, it is more likely 9000 or so poops I’ve cleaned up in NYC, but in deference to my friend Malcom Gladwell, I’m saying its 10,000 poops to make my point. 

So, I’ve more or less cleaned up 10,000 NYC dog poops.  It has been more of a tether of a routine,  requiring an extra step or responsibility to my life for the last 30 years.  Do I want to keep doing this when my old pal Calvin passes away.   I love dogs; but, I am tired of poop cleaning.  I got enough shit in my life, literally and figuratively to deal with.  I don’t plan to retire soon, business is exciting and time consuming.  I want to be more involved in my kids shit again (yea, yea), and would prefer the 10 minutes savings to read a book or write more substack crap.  And think about the environmental savings of no more plastic bags…I could move out the City into the country with fields of green, and the shit would be natural compost, a mine field, but no more plastic. But that fantasy does not really work for someone who needs the energy of NYC or London or Barcelona.  

So thus, my quandary.  What to do about the poop question?  Do I go another round of 15 years, 5000 more poop clean-ups, or go without the furry little buddy, the devoted friend who stares at me with unending love.  I am not sure.