National Guard trains a dog to know fifty commands, still working on 'no guns over haircuts.'

…(cont) That number is not small. I counted the tools in my garage toolbox once, out of boredom — I stopped at thirty-one and got tired. My glovebox holds four things: the registration, an ice scraper, a phone charger that doesn't fit my phone anymore, and a receipt for a fan belt I never got around to replacing. Whatever's sitting in Axel's head is more than a full toolbox, more than twelve gloveboxes. That's what kept me up.

So I did what I do when I can't sleep. I went back through the notebook. And I'm going to read this part back to you in order, the way I wrote it down, because I don't trust my own paraphrasing at one in the morning.

The earliest entry is from August 31st. A federal judge — Judge Amit Mehta, I have that name underlined — ruled that the Bureau of Prisons could force-feed the Afghan national accused of ambushing two National Guard members on patrol in Washington, while they're held in jail awaiting trial. I put 'nonconsensual nutrition' in quotes because that's the judge's phrase, not mine, and I didn't want to lose it.

Then September 9th. A member of the Georgia National Guard, deployed as part of a task force in D.C., was arrested for drawing a gun on a fellow Guard member. NPR called it 'an alleged dispute over regulation haircuts' — their words, and I'm keeping the word 'alleged' right where they put it.

Then September 22nd. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the D.C. delegate, sent a letter — her office says she's coordinating with the mayor's office too — asking the commanding general of the D.C. National Guard to keep troops away from schools unless they've been specifically directed there.

Three entries, and I want to be exact, because I got sloppy about this once and heard about it. The member in the haircut dispute belongs to the Georgia Guard. The letter about schools went to the commanding general of the D.C. Guard. The force-feeding order doesn't say which state's Guard the two ambushed members belonged to. Three different lines, three different columns of my notebook. I'm not going to draw them into one line just because it would read easier that way.

And then — wait, hold on, before I close this up — there's a fourth entry, the one that actually got me started, printed this week: the Michigan Guard, and the dog. A dog who can't hear a single command, headed out under the label 'ministry dog,' the same month three other pages of this notebook were filling up with a haircut, a letter about schools, and a judge's order about someone in a cell who wouldn't eat. I don't know what ministry means to whoever wrote that press release. I wrote the word down anyway.

So here's my question, and I already have the answer written down in front of me, so I'm not asking you to guess: how many commands does the paper say that dog knows?

Fifty.