Chew on This

I'm sitting in 'Big Fluffy', my recliner, and a familiar odor comes wafting past me. It's dog shit. Now I know that my dog would never do it in the house, and I hadn't been walking over by the church where he does do his thing, so where was it coming from? The answer was that it was coming from my shoes, and I had picked it up out in the dog run. It seems my tenants hadn't picked up their pug poo, and I stepped in it. The pugs in the front apartment are the cutest little things, but they always leave their little Tootsie Roll sized turds out on the sidewalk. My usual response is to take a stick and launch them like a golf ball over to the fence.

Thinking about those little turds brought back memories of my grandfather. He had some bad habits that by today's standards would be considered bad form. For one thing, he smoked White Owl Cigars, in the house. Even on a good day, with the windows open, and with an expensive Cohiba cigar, the odor is nauseating. Make that cigar the cheapest brand available, and it gets worse. Another thing he did was chew tobacco. Every once in a while gramps would send little Alan up to the drug store to get him a bag of Plowboy Chewing Tobacco, which the store clerks would happily sell to me without batting a eyelash. I probably should have got some beer at the same time, they seemed that unconcerned about an under aged kid buying tobacco. My grandfather chewing tobacco wasn't the disgusting part of this picture. It was what he did after he had chewed all the flavor out of that wet wad that turned your stomach. When the chew he was working on had reached it's limit, he would open the front door, and let loose, spitting the mess out across the porch. All around the front of the house were these little wads of what looked like turds. Sort of a mosaic in tobacco and spittle. Oh, and there was one more eccentric thing grandpa did. He saved his teeth as they fell out. It was always a thrill for us kids when grandpa would pull out that mason jar in the kitchen, and proudly show off the teeth that ninety years of chewing tobacco had ruined.