Writing the good read
I spent this evening hanging out with the extended neighborhood. We were remembering one of the most colorful of our number, Jack McPherson, who died a couple weeks ago after a brave battle with cancer. A few score people showed up with food and drink and stories tonight. Most were from the immediate neighborhood, but…
Ruby is a giant dog. She seems to be smart — she learns quickly, and loves to work for food. Her trainer Ali at Kinship Dog Training says she’s not stupid. But the things this girl is afraid of, even after nearly three years with us, never ceases to amaze me. Consider her top 10…
I know animals live in the moment, but the last 18 months with the four legged beast I call the Moose have really brought that home to me. Tonight I was trying to imagine her as an old lady dog, calm, serene, a distinct absence of exuberant bounciness. Couldn’t do it. I sit here on…
Yesterday I wrote about some older dog books — all published more than 50 years ago. Today, four books published in the last couple of years, all non-fiction, all dealing with how pets fit into our world or their interior lives. Top of the pile — and I mean that literally, not in terms of…
I was shelving the books I wrote about in part I of my latest dog pile book reviews and I came upon a cornered page in the very back of my copy of My Dog Tulip by JR Ackerley. The quote says everything about what is wrong with the way dogs were so often kept…
I read a lot of dog books. Fiction with dogs as characters; books about dog psychology; tomes that cover the history of the relationship between people and dogs. I’ve written here before about some of the great dog books I’ve read. Now, a few months later I find I have another stack of eight books…
Maybe there were more than four things, but these stood out: 1. The design isn’t intelligent if the parts wear out before the productive life of the unit is over. Teeth were not meant for a life of 80 or 90 years, and dentists make a living off this fact. 2. It’s not fun getting…
My dog died coming up on four weeks ago. That’s kind of misleading. We put her down. She was something more than 17 years old, a lab mixed with something else, probably pit bull from the shape of her head. She was deaf, increasingly blind, and so stiff from arthritis that it got hard for…