I am making my second turn onto Hill Street following Captain Raymon Holt’s recipe for speed walking – heel, ball, toe; heel ball, toe. The Langhornian sun monster is beating down upon me, getting in its licks. I believe the Langhornian sun monster knows when its own go away and exact extra punishment upon them when they return to see family or to bring their kids to Sesame Place. It’s sort of like Pennywise, but with less marketing potential.   

And why might I be walking so stridently under such a vengeful sun? Because cheesesteaks, pizza, baked potatoes, Italian hoagies, diners, a freewheeling attitude towards butter, home fries, Aunt Angela’s baked ziti, Aunt Angela’s meatballs, Aunt Angela’s sausage, Kohrs brothers ice cream, and, well, the list goes on and doesn’t make me look any better than the gluttonous slob you are currently picturing, so you can fill in the rest.

In sum: I need to walk off a few calories.

Walking is also one of my favorite activities. I get the same benefits from walking as I do from running, except without the daydreams about throwing myself into traffic every 40 seconds. Walking clears my mind; it relaxes me. With the mind clear, I brainstorm ideas without even trying – they just come from the automatic nature of the activity. Passing houses, people, and things makes me appreciate things more than sitting on my couch, where, say, a barbershop might escape my notice unless Jessica Fletcher is catching a murderer there.   

In Langhorne, I am void of pets. Well, I am in charge of feeding Rosie, my sister’s fish, but I have no doggy. To be more precise: I have no shih tzu, whose legs are four inches long and whose approach to walking is Zenlike, Buddhist, and as dynamic as kickboxing with a hermit crab. To paraphrase a long-lost sage: walking with a shih tzu involves long periods of boredom punctuated by seconds of sheer moseying.

I.e. not a great workout.

A loop around our local part of the park takes about fifteen minutes with the dog. This is if she’s motivated by the need to pee at her favorite spot near bench #3, cast a look into the metro station, take a pellet or two of hare poop as an appetizer, and then have an ecstatic roll around in the grass before going inside for breakfast. Add five minutes if she urges us to spend a while contemplating life and its draperies on her favorite bench (bench #6).

On this walk, she really enjoys her surroundings. She snuffles into grass, deep sniffs dog poop, and explores the urine-soaked landscape. She finds trees and bushes endlessly fascinating, slowly moving from one to the other. Sometimes she tilts her head and gazes as if she’s contemplating or processing what she’s just noticed or sniffed – cause that’s what she’s doing. According to studies, that quick whiff of pee or poop tells my dog who was there, when they were there, and what their mood was. I don’t know that I’d like to have the same skills (or I might never again enter a public bathroom) but the implications of such skills are clear:

My dog is Tonto.    

At 7:30 each morning, former spy and late-career writer Ian Fleming would wake at his estate in Jamaica called Goldeneye. His first order of business was to swim naked in the ocean and then eat scrambled eggs, followed by a sunbathe (we presume also in the al fresco). Then he’d sit at his golden Royal Quiet Deluxe and write 1500 words ‘without looking back’.

After this rush of work, it was time to stab some fish, so he’d go spearfishing, and then, as one does, to get pretty well hogged with pink gins at lunchtime. After this came a requisite siesta and then another sunbathe and swim. All this enjoyment would help him produce another 500 words in the evening before many ‘powerful drinks’ and dinner. Then a game of Scrabble and then bed.

This is how the man created James Bond.   

But it’s in the booze that we see Fleming be Bond, though perhaps not fully. Fleming was evidently peculiarly and infuriatingly specific about the construction of his martinis. Besides the shaken not stirred aspect, there was also lemon instead of olive, a correct vermouth, a correct gin, and – obviously – a correct proportion of each. These were explained to the drink’s builder (i.e. bartender) in detail and then, to his credit, upon tasting, Fleming congratulated the man as if ‘he had completed a fleet maneuver at tank speed’. Most of all these martinis had to be large.

But martinis were not the only booze that kept Fleming afloat. He peppered his vodka and would only mix bourbon with the ‘clearest branch water’. He found Napoleon brandy an atrocity and thought that no serious drinking should be done ‘under a hot sun’. Though he didn’t make a big thing of matching wine and food, he evidently had a fantastic eye for fine wines. A doctor suggested he switch from gin to bourbon for health reasons (we suppose at a time when ashtrays were present in examination rooms). And, after a heart attack in 1961, he was limited to three (horrific) ounces of alcohol a day and wrote to the British Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food to find out the best brands of every alcohol.

Though he lent Bond his tastes in, among other things, drinking and drinks, some of them were not fully conceptualized. When Fleming himself tried the Vesper that Bond drank throughout Casino Royale, he hated it. One journalist spent a day going drink-for-drink with Bond’s daily consumption in GoldenEye and ended up immobile and catatonic. Not especially ideal for toppling Janus and pleasuring Xenia Onatopp. But we forgive Fleming, for Bond is, after all, fantasy. We’re not pissed that Tolkien didn’t hike across a continent and throw a ring in a volcano. I mean, I’d buy that book, but it’s OK.

We’re leaving the house. Burke is packing her bag and I am rolling down my checklist.

‘We have piskoty and a water bowl?’

‘Check, check.’

‘Bottle of water, cooling vest, cooling pad.’

‘Check, check, check.’

‘Benadryl.’

‘Check.’

‘Poop bags. Sweatshirt.’

‘Check. Check.’

We pat our bags with each ‘check’ to make sure we have everything. We are going into the deep field. Well, the ‘field’ is the park in front of our house and the ‘deep’ part means we’re going to the pub on the other side of it. We leave. The dog is in bliss, only understanding that we are heading out on an adventure, whereupon she may sniff, lick, and eat things we come across or, more likely, pee on them.

As we head out into the bright day, I peer into my backpack to make sure I have all of my things now.

When I was a bit younger, I left the house with very little concern over the things I was bringing with me. I would be out and about for hours before realizing I didn’t have a wallet in my pocket or a watch on my wrist. Or shoes on. Responsibility then was a word more likely to come up in a spelling bee than as part of a personal doctrine.

That has changed a great deal over the years. Now, I can’t leave the house unless I have a book, a notebook, a pen, backup pen, two pairs of glasses, and change. In hot weather add to this a baseball hat, sunglasses, a cooling towel or a handkerchief to de-sweat myself, and a bottle of water. I am obviously not including the phone, which is attached to all of us like a fifth appendage gained through evolution. Small comforts come in the form of an arsenal of minor accessories.

But it’s hard to ignore the fact that my dog has become another accessory. She is always with me, at bars and on public transport. She is an accessory that comes with her own accessories. Like a Barbie, only one that I have to feed. Or maybe like a child, except it’s not like that at all because my dog is likeable and people don’t roll their eyes when I walk into a bar with her. Also, they won’t call any governmental services if I get tipsy and then carry my dog out of the bar on my shoulders.

And my dog doesn’t care. She is just thrilled to be along for the ride. She gets cookies and she gets to chill out on a padded bench and sleep while her parents have wine and beer and slowly devolve the what’s-for-dinner conversation from cooked food to cold food to fast food. Then she gets French fries.

This is what I take from my lapdog: don’t care. If it makes you happy to bring a small arsenal of accessories out to a bar that’s a 9-minute-walk from your house, then do it. If it makes you happy to get a 9-piece McNugget menu on your way home, then do it. If it makes you happy to get a 20-piece McNugget menu on your way home, then do it. But go see your doctor sooner rather than later.

If she can do it, then I can do it. My dog has very little concern about what others think. She is too eager to meet company. She poops in public. She yells at other dogs she doesn’t like. She sleeps right in the middle of the day. She licks her hoo-hah right in front of company, during dinner, and – if we went to church – there’s no doubt that she would gobble on her own bits right while JC himself was showing up for Communion.  

I care much less about what others feel about me now than when I was younger. But having a lapdog has executed any concern I had for others’ opinions. Who cares if people see me putting a sweatshirt on a dog? Who cares if they see me liking the salt off French fries to feed her like a baby bird?

Despite starting a tiff with a Scottie at the next table, our visit to the pub has been lovely. She has eaten some piskoty and is now relaxing for a several hour nap. We’re still discussing cold food for dinner (sandwiches), so there’s time yet to go. The bartender glances at my backpack; he knows full well that I live nearby. But if you can’t pack for a day at the pub with your lapdog, then who can you do it for?

Besides, I say to myself as I pull my dog’s sweatshirt over hear head, it would look weird for a man to bring a Barbie to the bar. And I don’t want to look weird.

I had a ‘free’ afternoon Monday, when Burke had to take the dog to the vet. It was part of the dog’s upkeep and maintenance retinue consisting of shots, eyedrops, checkup, prodding, pushing, what’s-that-lumps, and pills against a menagerie of small animals that can attack her: worms, fleas, and ticks.

Knowing nothing bad was happening at the vet, I kicked my feet up and read. I had bought this ‘free’ couple of hours with a ‘I buy, you fly’ deal with Burke. I gave her my card and she brought the dog to the vet. I was in a zen moment born of reading and having a fan directly on my face, when my credit card’s notification came in with the recent payment at the vet. Before I looked, I hazarded a guess for what the cost would be. Then I looked.

My first drink of the afternoon came in tandem with Burke’s message: sorry it’s so expensive, she needed shots for Lyme Disease and she needed that tick pill.  

That tick pill.

The tick pill looks exactly like a slightly-smaller individual piece of Rolo candy – a little brown thimble of medicine – and it costs roughly the same as what my dad paid for his last car. My irritation at its cost is both exacerbated and quelled by the fact that it works so well. Once this little flowerpot goes down her gullet, she will essentially have 3 months free of ticks. There is no such medicine for humans, I gather.

But now we’ve located the tricky part: getting it down her gullet. For as much as this helps my dog, there seems to be nothing she hates more than this little truncated cone. The key is masking the smell. In the past, we have attempted to do this by slipping it into a meatball, rolling it up in a pad of pate, and balling it with peanut butter.

You’re asking now: Well why not do that again?

Sure. But it seems that dog gets wily to our schemes. This animal, who can’t figure out that it can’t hold two sticks in her mouth at the same time, has evidently figured out that on occasion we try to sneak a small pill into food she otherwise loves.

This year I think I have outwitted her by breaking the pill up and putting it in her food. Only after he starts eating do I realize my huge mistake. She’s not only avoiding the spots in her food that carry the pill, but now I have to find the broken parts and put them into a vessel she will eat.

This is why, at 6:45 am on Tuesday morning, my neighbors wondered why I was making mashed potatoes. I worked some of the dog food into it and made it like dumplings. One or two went down, but then she narrowed her eyes and turned her nose away from the other potato balls tainted with the pill. My frustration grew.

“But these look just like the rabbit poop you like eating on our walks!”

This is true. In the park in front of our building there live a warren of rabbits. The ancestors of these rabbits evidently mated with horses at some point because these guys are massive. Surely, enterprising folks in my neighborhood will start training these rabbits and offering older folks rides to and from the metro on their saddled backs. These rabbits leave droppings the size of Cadbury eggs all along our walking path. And my dog will gobble them up as nonchalantly as if I were throwing her favorite cookies in front of us.

But mashed potatoes with a bit of tick-pill meat? No.