Monthly Archives: May 2015

Haste Ye Back

Posted on by
1

 Jack’s weekly guest post –

This has been quite the week – – – –

My niece Vicki and her daughter Elle flew off back to Scotland on Tuesday, while meanwhile Wendy headed off to Oregon on Sunday for a week. Vicki and Elle’s trip was incident free and they were home in Aberdeenshire by Wednesday morning, but Wendy got caught by the storms in Texas and ended up overnighting in LA before finally getting to Portland almost a day late. Of course the wonders of that interwebby thing meant I could share in the delights of the trouble-free journey as well as the horrors of the other one.

Meanwhile our ‘cafe couple’ Kelley and Sam took the low road and drove to Charlotte NC for a concert by ‘Night Wish’, the avant garde Finnish group, with tickets and a back-stage pass courtesy of my old singing buddy Barbara Dickson (one of the members of NightWish is Troy Donockley, Barbara’s musical arranger and band leader).

But what of me?

I have gone from living in a busy, bustling home full of relatives and friends to a solitary existence with only dogs and cats for companionship (and the foster-kitten population went from seven to three over the same period). Yesterday and today the cafe has been closed due to Kelley’s absence and mid-week is the bookstore’s quieter time. As the time moves towards noon and all the cats, dogs and kittens settle down to their siestas, I wait to see if I have to explain diplomatically to cafe customers as I did yesterday that Kelley deserves the occasional break (and who NightWish is!).

I often say that you can’t appreciate good health and lack of pain until you’ve experienced the opposite, and I think for a gregarious person like me, the same applies to companionship.

Haste ye back y’all!

The Monday Book: A SMALL FURRY PRAYER by Steve Kotler

Posted on by
1

I got this book because my agent recommended it. (We have somewhat similar reading tastes.)

Kotler fell in love with a woman who rescued dogs, and he liked dogs, so he became a dog rescuer. And dog philosopher, because this book is chock full of ethnographic and philosophical divergences into how dogs see the world, and how humans think dogs see the world. Those were pretty interesting.

The story is less a story than journalism, because Kotler is a research journalist. If you’re looking for “this puppy was SOOOOOO cute,” this isn’t the rescue book you’re looking for. It’s got a lot of depth to its analysis of why people rescue, but even more on why dogs (and all animals) matter. When you get to the part about Kotler getting in the cage with a mountain lion, you know you’ve having fun.

I wouldn’t say this is a book only animal lovers will love. Actually, Kotler’s love for his wife, which drove him to move to New Mexico and run a household dog rescue, is the unexamined force behind all the research he does into why dogs matter. And his observations of what it takes out of her to do this work are very astute. I’d almost recommend this book as a spousal manual for those who love rescuers, rather than rescuers themselves.

Still, it’s a wide ranging read, and New Mexico itself is an interesting (perhaps hysterical) character in the plot overall. The plumber won’t come on Thursday because the earth energy forces are bad. That kind of thing.

I was entertained, informed, and moved by this book – a rare triple crown. If you’re driven by stories, maybe this won’t interest you so much, but if you like journalistic storytelling, you’re gonna love it.