About Poop

Teri and Cindy will be here in a couple of weeks, and I’ve been trying to clean up my bedroom for them. I don’t sleep there which is fortunate for them as now they’ll have a bed. I always sleep on the couch in the living room. I’ve done that for years for many reasons, but that’s another story. I happened to see a book on my bookshelf which I hadn’t noticed for quite some time. It’s “Everyone Poops” by Taro Gomi. It’s a wonderful book with illustrations showing animals and one little boy actually pooping. The first two pages show a huge elephant with a big poop and the caption “An elephant makes a big poop,” and a little mouse with a tiny poop and the caption “A mouse makes a tiny poop.” The book goes on like that and I love it! It reminded me of when Teri and Cindy were little and we had dogs while they were growing up.

We usually had two dogs at a time. We had a big fenced-in back yard where they could play and poop. They were mostly house dogs so were in the house most of the time, but they did go out to poop. In the picture are Sammy, Brownie and Cindy. Sammy was a big dog and made big poops, but Brownie was no slouch in that department either. Cindy usually made big poops in the house. I was busy all the time cooking, cleaning, washing clothes and doing whatever else housewives were expected to do in those days, but I spent most of my time sewing outfits for the girls to wear to school and to play. While I did the sewing, I watched soap operas. I became so addicted to television that I made their clothes up until Teri was a senior in high school and had a bad experience. She was wearing a little Catholic school girl outfit and I think someone propositioned her as she waited for the school bus. We weren’t Catholic, but I had found a cute pattern for a plaid, pleated skirt that I liked, not realizing it looked like the Catholic school uniform. So you can see I had no time to clean up the yard what with the sewing and soap operas. I tried to get my husband to clean up the poop from the grass, but he said it made him gag. But then I thought of the girls . . . why couldn’t they pick them up, put them in a sack (they were all calcified) and make some money. I told them I would pay a penny a poop. Thinking back on it, it might have worked out better if I’d offered more than a penny. Well, they started out with the big grocery sacks and a shovel, but I discovered they were breaking up the poops into pieces so that one poop would be maybe 4 pieces or 4 cents. Now I couldn’t have that, so they quit. They went on to work at Pizza Hut, KFC and places like that where they were paid just slightly more than I paid. I don’t remember who ended up on “poop duty,” but since no one else would do it, I suppose I did.

I just remembered another interesting incident concerning poop . . . there can never be enough of those. One day recently when Cindy was walking her dog, Charlie, she saw an elderly man and woman get out of a car and start walking down the sidewalk in front of her. The woman was in front, and the man right behind her carrying a plastic bag. Cindy waited for something to happen and end up in his plastic bag, but nothing did. That was a big disappointment for her! Cindy always carries a plastic bag which is good, but I think she steers Charlie to the bushes so never picks up anything. But she at least carries the bag.