The Republic of Pop Eye

There are few creatures on Earth stranger than a man who willingly invites heartbreak into his house, feeds it twice a day, and then refers to it as “a good boy.” Yet civilization is crowded with such lunatics.

Entire neighborhoods are full of respectable citizens who will complain bitterly about taxes, Congress, inflation, and the price of eggs, then willfully spend three thousand dollars keeping alive a thirteen-year-old dog whose chief remaining ambition is to urinate on the carpet and bark at ghosts. I am one of these fools.

Last night proved it beyond any dispute fit for a court of law. We survived the evening better than the one before, though “better” is a relative term.

A man being kicked by a mule every twenty minutes might also report improvement if the mule pauses occasionally to eat oats. Buddy, our senior statesman of a dog, managed to tolerate the newest invader in the household with the exhausted dignity of an old ranch dog watching California tourists move in next door.

The invader is called Pop Eye.

Now there is a name suggesting either a cartoon sailor or a ward politician, and the little fellow possesses qualities of both. He is mostly blind, completely deaf, suspicious of shadows, and absolutely convinced that every object in the house belongs to him by executive order.

If Congress operated with half his confidence, this country would already have colonies on Mars.

The poor beast has no understanding of day or night. Nature ordinarily equips dogs with a useful arrangement wherein light means “sleep less,” and darkness means “sleep more.”

Pop Eye missed that distribution entirely. His internal clock appears to have been assembled by the federal government: expensive, defective, and incapable of telling anybody what time it is.

So, throughout the night, I wandered our home, escorting this tiny tyrant outdoors so he could conduct affairs of state upon the lawn. Then I guided him back inside, where he repaid my kindness by charging into furniture like a drunken senator leaving a fundraiser.

At around two this morning, he discovered the coffee table. By three, he had stolen my cell phone after attempting to chew through the charge cord, which I considered a bold but unnecessary commentary on modern energy policy.

Meanwhile, Buddy watched all this with the expression of an old taxpayer observing another government program getting introduced. He had seen enough disasters in his lifetime to recognize one early.

And now comes the sorrowful arithmetic. We cannot keep another dog.

A younger man imagines his heart unlimited. Age corrects this opinion.

Every dog we have loved has eventually broken us in the end, because dogs perform the most inconsiderate trick in nature: they die. They arrive as comedians and leave as funerals.

Yet people continue adopting them. A sensible species would stop after the first experience.

Humanity, however, is governed almost entirely by emotion, which explains both the owner of a dog and national elections.

Still, there is that other terror that comes with age. When you are young, you fear outliving the dog.

When you are old, you begin fearing the opposite, that the dog may stand over your grave, wondering why supper is late. That thought can flatten a man.

So tomorrow morning, I will carry Pop Eye to the county shelter and hand him over to the government, which is never a sentence that inspires confidence. I have long maintained that if bureaucrats were in charge of sunrise, dawn would arrive sometime around noon after three committee meetings and an environmental impact study.

But there are moments when a man must surrender matters to Providence.

Perhaps Pop Eye escaped from a loving home. Perhaps somebody is searching for him this very minute. Perhaps he was abandoned because the world contains people whose souls are leftover hardware. Or perhaps he sat down in the middle of a busy road because a blind and deaf little dog eventually grows tired of arguing with fate.

I do not know. I only know this: Pop Eye deserves better than confusion, my exhaustion, and two old people stumbling through the dark behind him while yelling, “No, not that way!”

And yet when the house grows quiet tomorrow night, I will miss him terribly. I will miss the barking at invisible enemies, the clatter of objects crashing from tables, and even the hunting for my missing cell phone while a half-blind outlaw drags it triumphantly beneath the couch like stolen war treasure.

That is the shameful truth about dog people. We complain while they are here and grieve when they are gone, and if that is not madness, then Washington is a beacon of efficiency and common sense.