His Dogness

At coffee the other Saturday, we got onto the subject of slobs.

Julie, who wants to run His Dogness’s Reading Club if it ever becomes a reality, suggested that I recount the tale of “Bill and the Flip-Flops.”

I did.

In case you haven’t heard it, here it is.

Many years ago, in the days before Bill married Susan and they had four children, he lived, for a time, in the house that I now share with His Dogness. You would be hard-pressed to find a more generous, likable and funny fellow than Bill. I mention this not only because it’s true but also to establish that Bill had many excellent points that more than offset the nuisance of him being a slob.

Fairness also requires me to mention that he claims that he is no longer a slob. After he moved to Arizona, he would call up and tell me how neat he had become. He waited in vain for my words of congratulation.

When he lived at my house, Bill exhibited traits that have irked neater members of households since the invention of pottery. Because he would have been content to leave dirty dishes in the sink until the cabinets contained not a single clean saucer and because I tired of only a marginal return on nagging, I ended up washing his dishes as well as mine more often than not. What really annoyed me, though, was expecting me to praise him whenever he did take care of the dishes.

In addition to the classics, he also had idiosyncrasies that I have not heard reported elsewhere. One related to the mail. When Bill came home, he would open his mail and sort through it as he strolled to the kitchen for a snack. If he was done with a particular envelope or sheet of paper, he would simply let it go, and it would flutter to the floor.

When I expressed annoyed dismay at his expectation that I pick up his trash, he expressed genuine surprise. He didn’t expect me to pick it up. As far as I could tell, from his point of view, the paper ceased to exist after he was done looking at it.

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that, given the wholly unsatisfactory nagging-to-results ratio, my mental health was better served by minimizing complaining and keeping the public areas of the house clean on my own. I told him that he was on his own when it came to his room.

And so it had been for some time when, one cold Saturday morning in February, he emerged from his room and announced that he was going to buy some flip-flops. Did I want to come?

“Bill, it’s February. Why on earth would you want to buy flip-flops?” I said.

“There’s all this crunchy stuff on my floor,” he said.

I mentioned that either the broom or the vacuum would take care of his crunchy stuff quite nicely.

What?

I no longer remember whether he was able to find flip-flops in February.