The Never Ending Surveillence

I used to think losing privacy was just a phase. Like diaper blowouts. Or Elmo.

My son was small once, which meant I hadn’t used the bathroom alone since the mid-nineties. There was always a tiny human pushing through the door to narrate whatever was happening in there with the clinical enthusiasm of a livestock auctioneer. Adorable. Traumatizing. Temporary, I told myself.

He’s grown now. Doing graduate school things, writing papers with vocabulary I have to look up and occasionally remembering to call his mother. I figured I’d earned the quiet. That particular chapter closed. A man and his Diet Sundrop and the reasonable expectation of solitude.

Winston had held the surveillance contract for years, of course. Cats are efficient about it. A flat stare from the doorway, the slow blink of professional judgment, then gone. You barely notice the monitoring until it stops.

Then came Captain and Morgan.

These two don’t observe. They accompany. There’s a meaningful difference. Winston watched. The Boyz attend. Every room. Every errand. Every inexplicable human decision, witnessed and silently logged by two golden retrievers who have apparently never once considered minding their own business.

Dinner, they’re stationed under the table like furry IEDs. Bedtime, they’re snoring beside my head with the total commitment of men who have nowhere better to be. And the bathroom, the bathroom I once foolishly considered a private matter, is now a standing meeting. Captain posts himself across the doorway with the gravity of a man guarding something genuinely important. Morgan simply appears, face-first, with the energy of someone who has just discovered you and finds this remarkable.

It’s supervision. It’s constant. It is, I’ve come to understand, love expressed as a complete refusal to leave you alone.

I crack a Diet Sundrop most mornings and think about how this happened. I got dogs, I think. Just dogs. And somehow I got this, two creatures for whom my presence is, against all available evidence, the best possible thing happening in any given room.

I’d argue for five minutes alone. I’d mean it, even.

But one of them would hear the chair scrape and come padding over with that look, ears soft, tail moving slow, the whole face asking nothing except whether you’re staying, and honestly. What exactly is it I thought I needed to do by myself.

Endearing little deputies.