At one point in my life I was living in a wonderful house on an acre of land, and the front windows looked out to the mailbox. Chester Burnette (a Great Dane mix) was there, and so was Hoover (a Malamute). They had strong feelings about looking out that front window. We had put a couch against the front window, a big couch, but they moved it out of the way so many times we gave up and moved it against the other wall.
There was a woman in the neighborhood who had two tiny dogs, and she walked them with her sweatband and sock tassels matching. Every day, she walked them up to our mailbox, which our dogs could see, and let them shit there. And then she walked away. On weekends, Chester alerted me to this, and I knew he wanted me to do something about it, but, like unstable people who study psychology, I’m a scholar of rhetoric because I’m terrible at it. How do you say to someone, “Um, your dogs’ shitting here everyday is not chance. Dogs shit to send a message. You shouldn’t let them do that. And, by the way, pick that shit up.”? Well, you say it by saying it. But I was raised in a barn by wolves, and I’ll admit I was so gerfuddled by her matching tassel and headband and appalling bad manners that I just wasn’t dealing.
So, one day, when she brought her dogs to shit at our mailbox, Chester jumped a six-foot fence, and brought me one of her dogs.
He was saying, very clearly, deal with this.
At that point, things were complicated. She was freaking out, and I loaded her and her dogs into my car, and took them to the vet. And on the way she told me about how her marriage was disintegrating. It is a condition of my family that total strangers unload on us about their lives, and I’m usually okay with that. I like hearing about the lives of checkers, people on the bus, salespeople, but I was not prepared for this. Her husband, a dentist, was leaving her for one of his assistants, and I heard way more about their marriage and him than I ever want to know about anyone. Way, way more.
When we got to the vet, the vet pointed out that Chester hadn’t actually broken the skin of her dog, and I paid the bill, and I took her home, and heard a lot more about her very vexed relationship with an apparently awful person. As far as I could tell, though, she was fine with his being awful till he wanted to bang an assistant openly. Once his awfulness was open, she was claiming victimhood and shock and all sorts of things. But the story she had told me on the way to and from the vet was that he was an awful person she was enabling. She only cared now because his behavior might hurt her.
And I could only intermittently care about the fact that she was willing to enable awful behavior until it hurt her. I just cared that I had fucked up by not earlier objecting to her dogs shitting at my mailbox. And I’m convinced she learned nothing from that whole episode. She thought the problem was Chester fetching her dog, but it really wasn’t. Chester, and my mailbox, and even her dogs had nothing to do with her being in a really toxic relationship with her husband.
I sometimes wonder whether I should have tried to talk to her about her own enabling and toxic relationship with the awful dentist? I didn’t. I just paid the vet bill and drove her home.
She no longer brought her dogs to shit at our mailbox, so I guess there’s that. I guess Chester did the right thing. I’d like to think that she stopped wearing sweat bands and matching tassels to walk her dogs, but that’s probably hoping for too much.