Disclaimer: Unlike most of my blog posts, which are painfully true-to-life, in the following post I have taken complete liberty to stray from a strictly truthful record of the facts as I recall them. I make no pretense of reporting in this post anything that actually happened in real life. Whether this story is inspired by people I have met and events that have occurred in my humdrum daily routine, or is dreamed up completely from whole cloth, shouldn’t matter at all. What’s really important is whether you, dear reader, enjoy the yarn enough to finish reading it before some other distraction captures your attention.

His code name is “Big Sexy,” and he’s August Mission’s most valiant volunteer for Ukraine. He’s been coming out to Ukraine for two-week “tours of duty” every couple of months since Russia launched its mad dog go-for-the-jugular offensive in 2022. 

Big Sexy is a saint in sackcloth, and his heart is pure gold. At home in the States, he dreams of working in a field where he can really help people who truly need help. Unfortunately, it doesn’t pencil out – he earns almost 5 times as much in hospitality as he could if he worked in health care – and he’d have to get additional training to take the lower-paying and messier health-care work.  So instead, he saves up his tips, collects donations from friends and whenever he has enough socked away, he makes a trip to Ukraine to deliver humanitarian aid to IDPs (“internally displaced people”).

On his last flight over, he sat next to a Parisian woman who was also a sympathizer to Ukraine’s current plight.  When they landed, after going through baggage claim, they each opened their luggage to exchange good will.  Big Sexy gave the Parisian lady several of the August Mission “Slava Ukraine” tee-shirts he was carrying, and she gave him several packages of dog biscuits (Parisians love their poodles, right?)  

When I met up with Big Sexy in Khmelnytskyi, before we even had our first drink, he gripped my arm, looked deep into my eyes and made me promise to find a worthy beneficiary for the dog treats. I solemnly promised to do my best, but in my mind I was skeptical. The only dogs I was aware of around the nursing home were the village strays who would gather around the back door of the home to gorge on the leftovers that some of the elderly residents like to collect and put out for them. These mutts are already over-fed, and I doubt they could tell a fancy French dog treat from a stale bologna sandwich. So I set the box of fancy dog treats under my bed, hoping inspiration would come.  

Sure enough, a few days later Alexander asked me why there were pictures of dogs on the box of fancy biscuits with French labeling.  When I explained that the fancy biscuits were actually just dog food in a fancy wrapper, his eyes got a little bit squinty and dreamy and he started stroking his chin – I could tell an idea was percolating . . . so, on a hunch, I gave the entire box to him.  

Closing the loop, he came back to me yesterday to describe how he had been trying to talk one of our neighbors, Stepan, into letting us take some decrepit old trees from Stepan’s orchard. We were running out of firewood, with still a few weeks of chilly early spring weather ahead. Knowing how Stepan trusted his old hound Baxter, Alexander had taken to slipping one or two of the fancy French dog treats to Baxter at every pretense he had to drop by Stepan’s cottage.  Before long, that old Baxter would follow Alexander around as meek and fawning as – well, as only a dog can be.  Once Stepan saw how much ol’ Bax adored Alex, it didn’t take much more nudging at all for Alexander to successfully ice the deal for the wood. 

If only dogs could figure so importantly in international relations as they do in personal relations, what a much nicer world this could be! For instance, imagine, in March of 2011, if Vice President Joseph Biden’s trusty sidekick Champ had accompanied the VP on his visit to Moscow, and if he and Champ had gone for walk in Alexander Garden together with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Konni and Buffy; after that, would VP Biden still have had the gall to brag about “looking deep into the eyes” of PM Putin and telling him, “I don’t think you have a soul”? And if VP Biden had not publicly crowed about telling PM Putin to his face that he doesn’t have a soul, would there be a war going on in Ukraine today? Far-fetched as it may sound, maybe it’s a question worth wondering about.