When you have a child, when they poop in the car, you change their diaper and clean up any residual mess that may have been caused. But that would be an exceptional poop. When you have a puppy with carsickness, you take him for a ride in the car and all the contents of his stomach go out either end.
Today, our puppy Jay Gatsby Carmichael pooped all over the backseat. Twice.
We were just about to our destination when I looked back to make sure he was doing okay. He was squatting over my mother's white regulations binder. Since we'd been driving up a hill, I assumed he was just trying to regain his balance. You know, because dogs have trouble standing up in the back of the car. Well I looked at my mom next to me, then looked back again, and there it was. Four brown logs of poop beneath his bowed legs. That's when we smelled it, like a flesh wound you don't feel until you see the blood seeping out of it.
"Oh God, Mom, he pooped!"
"Wha- Oh my God!"
We screeched to a halt at the curb, two blocks away from the destination, but neither of us cared. Scrambling out of the car like drowning rats, we escaped the wretched stench. I left my mom to battle the poop while I went to go pick up what I needed. It was the worst.
She somehow managed to make it so the car was tolerable, and we sped away. We were halfway home, on I-80 and halfway home, when I noticed Gatsby was freaking out. It looked like he was having a seizure. His big brown eyes looked back and forth and all over, and he shook from tip to tail. Then we smelled it again. This time, he'd pooped in two spots. So much poop, so much rancid poop.
My mom merged as fast as we could (not fast enough) and there we were at a grocery store parking lot. She ran in, all the cleaning products had been used on the first accident, while I sat and texted anyone I could because this? This was comedy gold. We spent almost a half hour in that parking lot, my mom cleaning and I feeling bad for doing nothing. But I'm not ready to be a mother. I'm not ready to clean up another person's poop. Or my own, for that matter. Either it goes in the toilet or it stays in your butt.
That's the difference between her and I. She cleans up the dog's poop with her bare hands and a dual combination of paper towels and Charmin wipes, and then she worries the entire way home about her poor sick baby boy. I sit on the hood of the car and spend the car ride with my nose out the wide open window.
The best part of the ordeal remains, as my mom holds up her keys. A look comes on her face.
"There's poop on my hands!"
"What?"
"Oh, there... there's poop on the keys!"
"Oh! Oh!"
"Hand me a wipe."
"Wait a minute, poop on the keys?"
"Yeah, hand me a wipe."
"How'd poop get on the keys?"
"I just... I don't know."
No comments:
Post a Comment