The crap we deal with

I had settled in for the evening. Boxers and a t-shirt, ready for bed, when I realized I hadn't blogged yet. So I settled in at my desk and began composing my thoughts. What to blog about...?

This was not a question, however, that Beaker found particularly interesting. More pertinent a question from her point of view is "who's taking me outside?" Lauren proved to be even more settled in that I, so I made myself a bit more unsettled and leashed Beaker up for her last walk of the night. Well, I thought, perhaps I can compose my thoughts in the cool night air.

Down a block, a woman in a car pulled up and asked for directions. A minor miracle occurred, in that I actually knew where she wanted to go and how to get there. Usually things described by lost motorists seem only vaguely familiar and I'm forced to stretch the truth by saying that "I just moved here." From four blocks over. She sped off and we continued on our way, but only a short time later, a block and a half from home, it happened. Beaker hunched up in the unmistakable position from which she disposes of the solid wastes of metabolic processes. She pooped in someone's driveway.

Which, of course, is what dogs do. Or doo-doo. Unfortunately, I had realized when I first got to the sidewalk that I didn't have any of the other doggie bags, the ones they don't give out in restaurants. For the last few weeks, her nightly walk has been, so to speak, a crap shoot. Fifty-fifty shot that she'll go rather than waking me at some undogly hour, and I banked on that when I decided not to trudge back up the stairs, into the house, and through two rooms to get bags.

Now, there was no one to see me leave my dog's poo there. I could have just gone home and forgotten about it--except that I couldn't. I went home all right, let the dog off her leash, but then I dug out the new bags and trudged back through the snow to where Beaker had made her deposit, and I scooped it up. Obviously not everyone does that; I see dung discarded from bigger dogs daily. I'm an unbeliever, so it's not like I think the backwards dog in the sky is tallying up whether or not I do the right thing each and every moment of my life, yet any time I've found myself in a similar droppings dilemma, I've always gone back, never left it there, even if it was several blocks from home. 

In part, I'm sure, it's because of the way I was raised. My parents insisted on cleaning up after myself, and so did other adults I saw. I remember my choir director in high school, when we went to another school for district or state competition, we had had to make a diagram of where everything was when we got there so that we could put it back just so--it's just what you did, you left places at least as clean as you found them.

In part, it's also because of being a teacher. I'm continually peeved when I see the evidence that kids have failed to take responsibility for the public places they inhabit, by leaving wrappers and other trash laying around (especially when there's a trash can not twenty feet away!). When I see kids do this, I call them on it, and several times a year I will more or less spontaneously burst into a lecture on the subject. That lecture, by the way, occurs in addition to any planned lectures on the topic that are occasioned by specific behavior.

Living in school environments, where such thoughtless behavior occurs commonly, I have a pretty good idea of what things look like when no one takes responsibility for their own actions, to say nothing of responsibility for the common space. I've seen it, I've hated it, and I am motivated to act based on both a hatred of hypocrisy (can't say one thing and do another!) and an earnest desire to live in the kind of world--or at least the kind of community--where people do take responsibility, and that starts with controlling the behavior of the only person I can. If I want other people to do the right thing when no one's looking, I'm really bound to do so myself.

Anyway, it gives me something to be self-righteous about on my blog, right? How do blogs even get written without at least a pinch of that stuff? 

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