Feist Dogs
Squirrel-hunting phenoms are renowned for breaking wind
You won’t find them at the Kennel Club
America’s all-purpose farm dog, celebrated by George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and William Faulkner, was made redundant by pesticides and a creepy urban preference for ‘pure’ bloodlines
Maude showed early that she was a smart dog. She learned that she got a treat when she peed outside. She started asking to go out and doing a fake pee squat. When I figured out what was going on, the treats ended. She stopped the fakery after realizing the jig was up.
I had no idea what kind of dog Maude was. Her very pregnant mother was abandoned near my brother-in-law Bobby’s house in middle Georgia. He was dying of cancer at the time, and there were lots of family, friends, and dogs around. That beagle-looking momma picked Bobby’s house and yard for her litter to enter the world. Maude was named by Bobby a few days before he died, so she was special from the start.
Maude is black, with some white on her nose and chest, and her brindle pattern getting stronger going down her legs. She has a tail curling over her back, which was full of sleek muscle, and a fine set of jaws. Her weight stays around …
The Fantastic and Terrifying Mr. Clean
A museum pays quasi-subliminal tribute to the decay that surrounds us, to which we must inevitably return
‘Don’t be a Button Hole’
Cleanliness is a road to divinity. But did Father know what was going on back home?
The headlines that morning in Pocatello, Idaho, were grim for a town of 57,000 people. I read them in the local paper at Elmer’s Restaurant while enjoying the house specialty, a “German pancake” with a crisp, raised rim that held the syrup and butter in a neat pool. A 27-year-old man had been sentenced to life in prison for murdering his mother, the director of a Humane Society chapter. Another man, 39, had been arrested after a high-speed chase for stealing a car with a “juvenile” inside — a baby or a teenager, it didn’t say. And over in Boise, the state capital, the legislature had passed a bill to permit the death penalty for “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel” acts of “lewdness” against minors under 12. The story mentioned that during its previous session, the legislature had passed another bill allowing for executions by firing squads “if lethal injection chemicals can’t be obtained.”
But to me, …
The Front Porch
This year I went to spring training in Florida with my son, which is corny. My son is 18 years old, lives on a ranch on the other side of the country and reads Wittgenstein, and comports himself very often like a grown man. At the same time, he’s not above bringing a baseball mitt to games or trying to catch home run balls during batting practice. Depending on the angle and the time of day, I can look at him and see the young man he might grow into being in his twenties, or I can see the young boy he was when his mother and I split up.
Having worked hard at being a good father, my reward is that I get to plan trips centered around some common subjects of interest, like the Alamo or spring training, to express the enormous love for him that I have carried with me from the day he was born. He was my first-born child, and as such a revelation that blew past any of my expectations about having children, which …
