This morning I got an update on a former foster dog — a Cavalier King Charles spaniel who lived with us two years ago, from just prior to Halloween to just before Christmas.
The dog had some kind of skin condition and arrived hairless, itchy, raw, reddened and miserable. He was about as sad as sad can look. He didn’t come with a name, so I named him Georgie, because his naked face reminded me of the illustration of the children’s book character Curious George.
Another volunteer, Huntly, picked Georgie up in Vermont and a mutual friend delivered him as far as a highway exit in New Hampshire. The first time I saw him, he was in a dog crate in the back of a van at a rest area, growling and snarling, his skinny body pressed as far back as he could get against the crate’s back wall, and looking for all the world more like a gremlin than a Cavalier. (More “Lilo and Stitch” than “Lady and the Tramp.”)
Prior to the pickup, he had been living by himself in an unheated trailer, with a litter box and a bag of cheap kibble. Details were fuzzy, but there was something about a divorce, and an owner who had moved to a place that didn’t allow dogs, and a hope that he might have been adopted to someone the owner knew. But who wanted a hairless, irritable dog with some kind of undiagnosed, ugly skin condition? [Read more →]
Remember AOL disks? If you owned a mailbox in the late 1990s or early-2000s, you know what I mean, because America Online’s aggressive direct mail strategy probably distributed CD-ROMs and diskettes into it with irritating frequency. More than a billion disks were mailed between the late 1990s and 2006, when AOL stopped the mass mailing. Or mass irritation. However you look at it.
In fact, the end of that era likely came without you being aware that is was, in fact, the end of an era. But that’s how evolution is, right? One day you have to bungee-wrap your trash cans against the bands of marauding wild animals outside your cave, and the next thing you know you can’t remember the last time you saw a mastodon happen by.
Things change. Technology evolves. And suddenly you’re dealing with a whole different set of problems. When was the last time you got a busy signal? Or went on (or heard of anyone else going on) a true “blind date”? Looked up a number in a phone book? Had one of your kid’s friends call the house phone? PC World compiles a list of these and other obsolete things here.
Which brings me to the real point of this post. The other day I unearthed the item pictured below from an old desk drawer. It didn’t seem that foreign an object to me, but my 12-year-old daughter had no idea what it was. “Is it some kind of violin bow?” she asked.
But you guys know what it is… right? Anyone…? (Shout it out below!)
I had some happy news last week: The story of Gigi’s adventure with her beloved green tomato has been picked up by The Bark, a magazine I happen to love. In other words, if I were a dog, my tail would be wagging like that of a retriever with a tennis ball. (Or Gigi herself with a pork chop.) Big shout here to The Bark editor Lisa Wogan for making it happen.
If you don’t know The Bark, it’s a bi-monthly magazine about modern dog culture, with a literary twist. If NPR’s office dog hung around after hours, The Bark might be what he’d produce as his moonlighting project. I’m tempted to say that there’s plenty in each issue to appeal to the non-dog lover as well. But I have four dogs, so you shouldn’t trust my opinion anyway.
My childhood friend Ron Ploof was so inspired by the pathos of Gigi’s story that he adapted it to the small screen. I think he did a fine job with it, and I particularly like the tweak of the ending. So what do you think?
The stage: A small wooden deck with sturdy balusters, overlooking a vegetable garden in late season.
Enter main character: Gigi, a 6-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. It’s clear from her saunter that Gigi is unhurried and uncomplicated, and her portly figure implies a dog who is enthusiastic about her meals. Suddenly, Gigi sees something that piques her interest, and a drama ensues.
Scene 1: Gigi spies a green tomato that has fallen from its vine in the garden. From the glint in her eye and quickening of her step, it’s clear she considers the green tomato a tasty prize — a kind of lucky harvest her enterprising belly has stumbled upon.
Scene 2: Lacking a working knowledge of spacial relevance, Gigi attempts to reach the tomato by squeezing her ample physique through the (blasted!) unforgiving deck rails. In an instant, she regrets the enthusiasm with which she enjoyed last night’s second helping of chicken pot pie, delivering in response to her successful, if pitiful, whining. She wonders whether she might have managed the evening just as well with less, and whether that might have made all the difference, right now. [Read more →]
We set off on foot, the six of us, under an azure sky as big as the ocean. The breeze off the water smelled of salt and September, and the dune grasses bent toward each other, whispering the news that fall was coming.
It was a picture-perfect, precious August day, the kind of day that a talented someone with a camera might photograph and print onto a postcard, which someone else might then buy to send to a friend, to show how big the Maine sky can look over an endless sea; and how the line from the midday crowd snakes lazily out of the soda fountain, through a squeaky screen door propped open all day, in turn, by the backside of whoever happens to be waiting for service next; and the way the wild beach roses that grow straight out of sand, impossibly, cascade over a split-rail fence, tumbling like curls over a toddler’s forehead.
The idea was simple: Each of the three teams of two was armed with a single list of two-dozen things to scavenge from around the tiny seaside village of cottages and a few public buildings. Things as in things: a bit of beach glass ground smooth in the surf; or a bit of clothing lying abandoned on the beach, stiff with sand and salt; or a ripe rose hip, red as a miniature candy apple. And also things as in information: the year the Curtis Guest House opened for business, or the color of the roof at 18 Maine Street, or the first name of the formidable guy behind the tall oak counter at the post office.
Each team paired a grownup with a teenager (or near-teen), and so Rachel and I became partners. In some ways, Rachel, who is almost 13, and I, some 30 years older, we were a fitting pair. She and I approached the list seriously—and, I thought, intelligently: Scrounging the more common facts in a guidebook that we found lying around the house. There was an efficient economy to finding the name of the present village Association president as it was printed in the book, rather than, for example, having to step into the association office and actually asking. [Read more →]
We set off on foot, the six of us, under an azure sky as big as the ocean. The breeze off the water smelled of salt and September, and the dune grasses bent toward each other, whispering the news that fall was coming.