Moose

My friend Leonor sends out a newsletter every week. It doesn't really contain a lot of news, but is more like a blog that I get by email, and every Thursday I get to read what Leo's thinking about, what she's reading, which GIF sums up her week, what she's watching, and a bunch of other stuff that sometimes I just skim but sometimes is also really interesting. (Sorry, Leo. I don't listen to podcasts so I skip that part.)

This week, she talked about her dog, Moose, whose death spurred her to start the newsletter. I wrote back to let her know that I, too, once had a dog named Moose, and that dogs named Moose are generally the best dogs.

Moose was one of the iconic dogs of my childhood, a large weimaraner with amber eyes whose real name wasn't actually Moose. Since he was a purebred, with papers and a bloodline, his official name was Baron of Ulster. My parents are from Ulster County, New York, so this probably made sense to them, but for most of his life we called him Moose, and that's what he answered to. In his later years, my brother took to calling him Vern for reasons unknown to me, and he sometimes answered to that as well.

Moose tumbled into our lives in 1980, when we were living at the Stewart Air Force Base. I was four, about to turn five later in the year, when Moose exploded onto the scene. The explosion was literal: Gretchen, Moose's mother, gave birth to him in our house during a Cub Scouts meeting. My mom, excellent multi-tasker, kept the meeting running while ducking into the other room to midwife the puppies. I barely remember Gretchen, as she had a stroke while giving birth and only lived a few more weeks, but I remember the puppies. Since they all looked the same except the small tiny runt of the litter who, I think, died, my mom tied colored string around their necks so that we could tell them apart, and we called them by the names of their strings: Blackie, Greenie, Bluey, and a few other colors.

I have no idea which color Moose was, but he was the one we kept, and he moved with us to Kentucky, then to Alaska, then back to New York. We also had Yapper, a hateful fox terrier that my parents had before I was born and who never liked me until he was much older and dying, for most of this time, so each time we moved my parents drove two kids, a fox terrier, and a large weimaraner across the country. Coming back from Alaska, they also transported a caged gerbil, because I was unwilling to give him up. When we lived in Kentucky we briefly also had two beagles, Bandit and Old Yeller, but they did not move with us to Alaska, and lived at a kennel, never at our house, so they never actually felt like pets. I'm not sure if we sold them or just gave them away, and now that I realize I don't know I'm afraid to ask my parents because I don't want to hear that they sent them to a shelter.

Knowing how my parents value dogs, I don't think they did, but again, I choose not to find out for sure.

Maybe they went to live out at a big farm in the country, with lots of room to run around and other dogs to play with.

There aren't really any definitive stories about Moose. He didn't save a bus full of schoolchildren from an oncoming train, or run for help when I fell down a well. (I didn't actually fall down a well. I'm making a Lassie reference. I did fall into a pool once, while dressed as a ghost in a sheet with no eyeholes cut into it, but that's a story for another day. Moose did not save me then, either.) In his later years, he was missing a tooth, because my brother was playing a game with him in the backyard where he'd hit a ball with a bat and Moose would bring it back, and Moose got too close while he was hitting and caught the bat on the backswing, knocking his tooth out. The vet offered to put in a steel tooth, which my brother and I thought was the best idea ever but which my parents vetoed.

In thinking about him for the past few days, I realized that my memories about Moose are hazy in two significant ways:

1) He didn't live as long as I thought he did. I remember us having him forever, through so many homes and moves. He was always a warm, large, but somehow soft presence, rubbing his head against your leg to get petted or curling up on a couch cushion. I remember him in so many of our homes and backyards, coming back from hunting trips with dad or barking at neighbor kids when they ran into our yards, but when I checked the plaque on his statue:



it turns out that we put him to sleep in 1991, when he was eleven.

And I use the word "we" very generously above, as I think my mom actually had to take him to the vet herself because we were too sad and wouldn't go with her. My dad might have gone, but I don't remember.

2) I struggle to remember him as an older dog. I know that he aged. I know he got cataracts and had trouble seeing out of one eye. His joints hurt him, and he couldn't go hunting anymore, because charging through the woods left him laid up in pain for days. I vaguely remember that he had trouble climbing up onto the couch or jumping down from it, but I don't remember what the final illness was. Instead, when I picture him in my head I remember him how he was when we lived in Alaska, which I guess was middle age for him.

I mostly just remember that he loved us, and he was a good dog.

Books 50-57: I've been reading kind of a lot

I've read a bunch of books between September and now, especially because I went to Atlanta (where I almost died) for a week and always read more when I'm out of town. I don't really have an excuse for not discussing them sooner other than procrastination, though, so it's time I went ahead and started working through the stack.

Mostly so that I can take them to the used bookstore for more credit to buy more books.

Seriously, we had a candidate in for an interview yesterday and she asked if anyone would be interested in a book club, and my "YES" was louder than the other 40 people in the room.

I might be too excited about reading.

50) I ordered a copy of Aimee Friendman's Sea Change because I watched the movie on Lifetime and still had some questions. Unfortunately, the book didn't answer my questions, because the movie was pretty different. I hate to say it, but the movie was actually better, because it made the story more coherent in the same way that the movie versions of Big Fish and V for Vendetta take the interesting ideas of the original source material and make them better.

If you're interested, the book is about a girl who moves for the summer with her mother to a mysterious island, rumored to be founded by mermaids and pirates. She meets the rich summer tourists, and the much nicer but more mysterious island natives, and starts to fall in love with Leo, a local boy with a heart of gold. (In the movie, that heart lies beneath rippling, Emmy-worthy pectorals that flex and twist as he pulls his clinging wetsuit on and off and on and off and on and off again.) Is Leo more than he seems? Is he hiding a dark secret? Is Miranda's life in danger?

Who cares? This was diverting enough for an afternoon, but just watch the movie.

51) I bought Hillary Clinton's What Happened because I kept seeing news stories that said, "Hillary said this about Bernie" and "Hillary said this about why she lost" but kept giving a sentence or a paragraph, and I wanted the full story. I didn't vote for Hillary in the primary, but I did in the main election, and I wanted to see for myself what she had to say and the context in which she said it.

This was, mentally, a hard book to get through. It wasn't because the writing or vocabulary was difficult. This is very readable, and covers her life, typical days on the campaign (there's a whole section about one day, from morning to night, with travel, hair and makeup for appearances, meals, etc. and how all of that gets coordinated that was fascinating), an overview of the campaign itself, the policies she would have implemented, and what she thinks about how to move forward. The mentally difficult part was reading this at night, then turning on the morning news for an immediate contract between where we as a nation could have been and where we actually are.

I would recommend this book to anyone, whether they voted for her or not.

52) Searching for a mental palate cleanser, I moved from the horror of reality to just plain old horror, and read H.P. Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness, partially inside of a Hard Rock Café playing Michael Buble. It was way more amusing than the time I cried at Chili's, but possibly just as disturbing.

I've read a lot of books that reference Lovecraft, including graphic novels, and am aware of the basics of Lovecraftian mythology (cosmology?), but I realized after reading Meddling Kids in September that I haven't ever actually read any of Lovecraft's work. I guess I went in with high expectations, and while I enjoyed this, I found it not really horrifying. Maybe it would have been if I didn't already know so much about it going in, but I guess I would qualify it more as disturbing than as horror.

53) My friend Sandy left Sheryl Monks' Monsters in Appalachia in the guestroom when I went to stay with her, in case I had finished all the books I packed for my trip. I hadn't, but this was short, so I decided to read it anyway.

This is a collection of short stories about Appalachia, but only one of them has monsters in it. In all of the other stories, the people are the real monsters, but that's the way it is in most stories. This was a fast read, but I liked it.

53) I guess I was still in a horror mood, because I moved on to Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks from Hell, a book about horror books. Hendrix walks the reader through the pulp horror paperback boom of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, with summaries, discussions of trends and the real world factors that influenced them, tons of illustrations of cover art, and interesting profiles of the publishers, writers, and artists who helped create these books. I was amused to discover that I had read multiple books that appeared here, and also thought about seeking out some others because they sounded entertainingly bad.

I mean, one of them is a book about genetically altered Nazi leprechauns in a haunted Irish castle. Why would I not want to read that?

54) I changed gears for the next book, but kind of wish I hadn't read it. Remember when J.K. Rowling wrote The Casual Vacancy and everyone was like, "Hmm, yeah, are you gonna go back to wizards and muggles soon?" The Next Queen of Heaven is Gregory Maguire's "Casual Vacancy", although I'm pretty sure from things mentioned in the book that he wrote this before Wicked and just didn't publish it until after.

This book tells the story of fall and winter in a small town in upstate New York, mostly through the eyes of a troubled family and the troubled music director at the Catholic Church in town. There's also a retirement convent of elderly nuns, a lady speaking in tongues, a surprise wedding, a couple of surprise pregnancies, and a gay male singing trio looking for a place to rehearse. Also, someone's speaking in tongues, someone's dying of AIDS, and someone burns a church down, but really I didn't care much about any of the characters and mostly just wanted this book to be over.

55) I witched gears back to horror, sort of, with Colin Dickey's Ghostland, which was a really fascinating American history of haunted places. Dickey doesn't actually ever say whether he thinks ghosts are real or not, but instead talks about the sociological and historical reasons why a place becomes "haunted", how history is distorted and hidden by hauntings, and how they become commercial and profitable. In touring America's haunted places he brings us to buildings, bridges, ponds, and even whole cities that are haunted, and explains the history behind the stories as well.

This was a really interesting read.

56 and 57) Fully returned to horror as a topic area (which is probably fitting, so close to Halloween), I read an article that discussed how Lois Duncan was underrated as a novelist, and how her books still hold up today. Curious to see if this was true or not, I picked up a few of her books at the used bookstore, and they are entertaining, if a little short.

Stranger With My Face introduces us to Laurie Stratton, whose life is finally on the right track. She has a cute boyfriend, she's friends with the popular kids, and she gets along with her whole family, but things suddenly go awry when people start seeing Laurie around town. Was she meeting another boy on the beach? Did she ignore entire conversations? Is she out walking on the dangerous rocks by her house? Or is it someone else who looks exactly like her, who knows her, and who wants to be her?

Down a Dark Hall brings Kit Gordy to an exclusive boarding school in Blackwood Hall, so exclusive that it turns out to only have three teachers, and Kit is one of only four students. Just into the start of the new term the girls are discovering hidden talents for painting, music, math, and poetry that they never had before, but they're also constantly exhausted and not eating. Their letters to family members and friends keep disappearing, and the only phone is locked in the headmistress' office. Is the school bringing out undiscovered gifts in the students, or is something taking them over, slowly consuming them until there's nothing of the original girls left?

Both of these were entertaining, and a good blend of atmosphere, character, and speedy plot. They're meant for young adults, but the author of the article I read was right. These books do hold up, decades later.