Divine Relief

(1 : just warming up)

The Sunday Times of 25 January 2009, in its “Weird but wonderful” reporting on page 20 of Section 4, notes a former politician’s peculiar admission as reported earlier in Total Politics magazine.   The politician, a man of advancing years found himself in need of a pit stop.  Unable to find or to make it to a lavatory, he stopped his car, got out, and popped open its hood to have a look see.  Availing himself of the guise of a breakdown, he relieved himself.  Shortly thereafter, the report continues, a passer-by stopped to advise the politician of  the potential cause of the breakdown.  ”I think your radiator is leaking”, the passer-by suggested, seeing nothing else amiss.  Yes, sir! His coolant gone, I imagine that the politician was hot by time he made it home.

(2 : oh, bother)

The keep Britain clean laws being what they are here, and for reasons of public health and welfare, I have to pick up my dog’s poo almost as soon as it hits the ground.  I’m okay with that.  I may be an American in the United Kingdom, but I like to think that I am part of the public being protected.  But, perhaps, I may be doing more harm than good to the environment.

Of course, I am using bio-degradable bags.  Bio-degradable is great, though I am a bit worried one will degrade as I use it.   You see, I purchased a massive load of bio-degradable bags before I left North America; and, I brought them with me.  The fact that the bags were not sold with use-by dates, however, suggests that I am relatively safe.  So what have I to worry about?

Recent studies - which I can’t seem to find my way back to - found that the plastics, even bio-degradable plastics, will remain in the environment for ages to come.   Actually, reports of harmful environmental effects of nurdles, those plastic remains, have been floating around for nearly a decade now.   That kind of bothers me.  When I was a kid, if my father had had to pick up poo, he’d have used a paper bag.  That is, if he’d had to use a bag.  Paper bags only kill trees - don’t they? - and trees are replenishable, assuming that forests are properly stewarded.  Even as late as 1972 in the movie Pink Flamingos, Divine used a paper bag - the kind that mothers across America used to pack school lunches - to handle her dog’s poo.  But, I really have to wonder, “Is that sanitary?” 

Divine’s use of a school lunch bag was actually a cool little bit of what they call “fore-shadowing” in the industry - the two-bit English-major’s-got-a-major-movie-obsession industry that is - ¡May John Waters live forever in our memory!  It’s at the end of the film; Divine eats the poo.  I would later think to myself, “That’s probably what eventually killed Divine!”  Of course, Divine died after making the movie Hairspray.  And, breathing in the hydrocarbons from hair spray more than likely did the trick.  Oh, the humanity!

That leaves the question on the table.  Is handling dog poo, let alone eating it, sanitary?  

Well, the TreeHugger site seems to have been pondering the question simultaneously.  It makes me wonder if it isn’t true that “You can take the boy out of America, but you can’t take America out of the boy.”  The quarks firing our minds have not yet been separated by the consumption of English food or, the better, the Kingdom’s bitters. TreeHugger is “a Discovery Company”.  You know, the folks who bring you and me the Discovery Channel, worldwide.  You’d presume it’s got some street cred.  So, I am not entirely some dumb wush-backer who’s got a crazy new idea, or, phobia, anyway.  Just yesterday, in it’s 28 January 2009 post, TreeHugger suggests that Eating Dog Poop Could be Good for You.  

Well that headline may be a bit of an overstatement.  I’ll let you read all about it; and, decide for yourself.  But, let’s face it: cheese wouldn’t be so tasty if it weren’t for dirty little bacteria.  Or, as a college roommate once observed, “mushrooms grow out of shit” - composting rot would be more precise, but you get the picture.  A more scholarly proof of concept is suggested by Jared Diamond’s 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.  The first American’s die off in massive numbers because they were clean after a fashion of the germs that killed them.  But, that’s a far stretch from dog poo and from my concern.

My family had several dogs when I was a kid.  I can’t ever recall that my father used paper bags to pick up poo; he was, however, quite the fan of the shovel.  Sometimes after a day of free-ranging the dog, there’d be a whole lot of divots in the yard where the shovel exposed the naked earth.  Had I been British, and of a certain privilege, I might have believed a polo game had taken place on the lawn.  I just wonder what Britons would think of me were they to see me walking the dog with a shovel on the horizontal, a wafting load and maybe a few blades of grass in it’s pan?

I tell myself that the bag is a convenience, worth the price of their knoodling nurdles.  Juggling a shovel while walking an eager, often unruly, and sometimes overtly anxious dog would be quite an inconvenience.  I should suggest bags, or, a shovel to the mother who left a used nappy (that’s a diaper for you Americans) on the narrow crossing of the bridge over the Cambridge rail lines today.  But, that doesn’t begin to touch my concern.

People are kind of odd about dog poo here, obviously in a way that they aren’t concerned about human waste.  Not that they shouldn’t want me to pick up after my dog.  I want people to pick up after their dogs and themselves, too.  It would make walking into the park so much more pleasant.  But, more than one person has stopped and glowered at me, even after seeing me with hand in bag bending over for the pick-up as the dog tugs at me to move on to the next best thing.  I wonder how many people actually pretend they’re going to pick up poo, waiting until the observer is out of sight.  None.  Not one.  That’s how many.  Onlookers glower. They stay put until the poo is in the bag.  I want to stick my tongue out at the watcher after I’ve bagged the poo; but, I think that would induce gag response.  The poo smell just recently up my nostrils, I’d barf all over the bug-eyed onlookers.  But, that doesn’t bother me either.  Not really.  I am sure that I glower at the parents of children in the public brace and bit.  

As I bent down to retrieve a recent discharge, this little spot of bother became clear.  I noticed that Spring’s flowers have popped their little heads up through their protective coats of earth.  And, I momentarily lamented having to remove nature’s fertilizer.   I saw a vision of my dad, shovel in hand, carried away toward the compost pile.  

So, it appears that there will be flowers in the garden anyway.