THE THREAD | Time and the Art of Picking up Dog Shit
One night this past week, I caught myself feeling this particular angst of uncertainty that has come up so often over the past two years. I just couldn’t quite shake the sneaky suspicion that this virus is causing everything in the world to unravel once again. So I bundled up and left the house to take the dogs for a walk to relieve themselves, because nothing gets your mind off of existential dread better than stooping down with a plastic baggie over your hand to scoop up another living being’s steaming pile of shit.
Walking the dogs in the mornings, I turn left at the sidewalk and head south on Baltimore. In the evenings, I turn right on the sidewalk and stroll north. This difference of direction was never a deliberate decision. It has just slowly worked itself into a groove of habit over the past two years spent walking back and forth in many directions, not really getting anywhere. Even lost people love a decent habit.
When I turn right and head north in the evenings, before I reach the end of the block I can pick up the scent of clean laundry in the air. There’s a laundromat just around the corner on Main Street. Among the many scents that carry over from the Main Street businesses and into my neighborhood, the smell of clean laundry is one of my favorites. Also, it makes me want a beer.
Three years ago when I moved into this house, Davey’s Uptown Rambler’s Club stood on the corner opposite the laundromat. For several decades Davey’s had been a music club and dive bar, a mainstay in midtown. When we first moved in, I would occasionally walk over to meet a friend for a beer at Davey’s, or I would take a book and sit at the bar by myself. The bartender, Mokie, didn’t give much of a shit. He spent as much time out on the sidewalk smoking cigarettes as he did behind the bar. The walls and ceiling were painted black to hide whatever was peeling, crumbling, or growing mold. The mirrored wall behind the bar was covered in photos and handbills from the hundreds of bands that had played at Davey’s over the years. The beer was cheap.
My family did not have a washer or dryer when we moved in. On several occasions I would haul our laundry to the laundromat, get the loads started in the washers, then walk across the street for a beer at Davey’s. It’s not that I couldn’t just as easily have sat and waited in the laundromat. Sometimes I did. But the social scene at the Main Street Laundromat is lively, high energy, supremely interactive and frenetic. The room is more than adequately lit by fluorescent lights. There’s much more than laundering going on in there. The chairs lining the walls of the laundromat are full of lively worn-out people and their children, consuming vast amounts of candy and soda from the vending machines. Sometimes I would become one of them and allow the overstimulation to toss me around like a tumble dryer. But more often than not, if I have to choose between the two, I prefer a glass of beer at the end of a bar where people mostly leave me alone in a room lit poorly enough that I can’t see what might be dripping from the ceiling. We all have our druthers.
In March 2020, just a few days deep in the nationwide shut down, I woke to the sound of sirens. Fire trucks sped down my block. I stepped out the door and smelled something different coming from the corner: smoke. I put on my shoes and coat and walked to the end of the block. Flames poured out the windows. Foul black smoke replaced the smell of clean laundry in the air. Davey’s was burning.
At the time, I was convinced we were facing two or three weeks of a shutdown. It felt so hard to imagine being holed up at home for a few weeks, but we knew we were doing the right thing: letting a deadly virus pass through quickly. This would be hard, but it would all be over soon. As I stood there shivering on the sidewalk watching my corner bar burn, I was thinking, “You know, I guess the next month of shutdown is as good a time as any for some renovations at Davey’s. Maybe they’ll get rid of the mold. Hopefully it won’t lose its character. Hopefully Mokie will be back to not giving a shit in no time. Hopefully this virus isn’t as bad as it sounds. Hopefully.”
That was nearly two years and five million deaths ago. As I walked the dogs the other night, I paused at the corner, gazing at the still-shuttered Davey’s, then gazing at the bright light pouring through the windows of the laundromat across the street. I saw lively worn-out people still washing their clothes. Some of them wore masks. I smelled the clean laundry. I wanted a beer.
I closed my eyes. I imagined the scent beckoning me down the block again, through the front door at Davey’s, and onto a torn leather bar seat, just like it used to be. I imagined ordering a Miller Lite, and in the short amount of time it took for me to place the order and for Mokie to pour it from the tap into the glass, I imagined that some awareness would come over me: some kind of awareness that time never passes as quickly as we would like when we want to get through something fast, nor does time last as long as we hope when we want it to slow down. Time does not adhere to our hopes. What a cruel, honest lesson I imagined for myself as I waited on Mokie.
I imagined him walking over to me, placing the glass in front of me, and saying, “That’s two bucks.” I imagined dropping my cash on the bar and reaching for my pint. I imagined placing my hand around the cool glass.
Then I opened my eyes. The smell of the laundromat had been replaced by something awful. I looked down on the ground where one of my dogs had just finished relieving herself. I pulled the small baggie out of my pocket, stretched it over my hand, and reached down to pick up the pile. Time does not adhere to our hopes. Some days it seems the best you can do is to quit attaching so much meaning to time, pick up the shit you’re responsible for, and carry on the habit of walking back home.
What I’m currently reading: Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not the Mood, Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, Talking Points Memo’s series “Readers on Schools”
What I’m currently listening to: Veruca Salt’s 1997 slammer “Volcano Girls”
I intended to share another part of Three Books From the Shelves today, but then the omicron variant became the dominant force in my mind the week. So maybe look forward to Part Two next week? Or maybe not. It’s another strange week in the life of this pandemic. Take care of yourselves and those in your path, and please be kind. I say this as someone still working on it: It matters what we are going through, and it equally matters how we move through it.
Peace and grace,
Andrew
Thanks - I needed this today.