The shopping carts.
I run with my dog, Lita, down the canal almost every day after work now that the weather is nice. The water has been drained for about a week and the city cleans out everything that people have thrown in with small bulldozers; collecting it in a pile at the edge of the concrete wall. It’s mostly shopping carts from the nearby grocery store piled on one another, like a cheerleading pyramid, but there’s usually a few other interesting items. I like to take a break on my run at this part of the canal to look at the trash pile and see what else has been collected. Today there was a lawnmower, a lacrosse stick, a fishing pole and a flashing street baracade. Why anyone throws this stuff into the water is beyond me. Teenagers, I guess. Who else would put in the effort to huck a fifty pound lawnmower in a canal?
So here I am staring at the trash pile, when Lita starts to take a shit right in the middle of the path. Not really a big deal, I have one of those little plastic baggies to pick it up with tied to her leash. But here’s the thing — I’m right in the middle of the canal — Which means it’s about a quarter mile either way to get to a garbage can. Immediately I check the surroundings, and of course here comes a woman. Not just any woman, but a woman in a visor. Women in visors mean business. They don’t take any shit. Get it? She stares right at us as Lita pinches off. Her turds are piled on one another, just like the shopping carts, right in the middle of the path. And here comes the woman, her hair flapping against her visor as she marches towards me. She makes eye contact with me and looks down at the shit, telling me with her eyes that I better have that gone before she gets there.
I picked it up, in the way a child does as when they are told they have to do something they don’t want to. I smiled smugly as she passes me. ‘There. Are you happy?” I asked her with my squinting eyes and smug smile. She raises her eyebrows and smiles just as smugly back at me, as if to tell me she knows that if she wasn’t there I would have just left the steaming shit pile in the middle of the path. And she is right, I would have. Because running for a quarter mile with a bag of shit in your hand is terrible.
