Sparky may have a wandering eye.  Not in the Bill Clinton, man-whore, way.  The dog pound cut his nuts off before they handed him over.  I mean in the amblyopia way I recall from those after-school specials they used to have on TV.  The kid with the lazy eye gets picked on until his mom takes him to the doctor.  He still gets picked on because he has to wear an eye patch.  A kind Art teacher makes him a pirate eye patch and he becomes popular on the playground.

That was back when pirates were the Treasure Island kind, and not the skinny Somali pirates we have now.

While I’m having dinner, Sparky will chide me for being fat, hoping I will give my food to him.  I tried a counter-strike by making fun of his lazy eye.  It didn’t work.  Sparky says that he trained himself to do that.  He said that when one eye hits a hard-stop because his nose is in the way, his other eye can sweep a little farther.  That additional field of view gives him a predator advantage.

Sparky says that’s also why he occasionally blinks one eye at a time.  He wants to maintain his sight picture.  That’s good to know.  I thought he was flirting with me.

I didn’t ask why he needed a predator advantage when his main prey is dead birds and baby bunnies.  He had a full life before he retired with me.  Sparky doesn’t talk about it much, but I get the sense that he was involved in some dodgy work.

When Sparky is busting my chops, I can go back to pointing out that he doesn’t have the ground clearance he had when I picked him up.