March 23 is National Puppy Day, when you’re reminded to “Adopt Instead of Shop.”
Thought I’d share a photo of my dogs Brutus and Hamlet (both gone long ago to the Rainbow Bridge).
My father was going to do a sketch from this photo but never got around to it. No matter how many times Brutus proved to himself that he couldn’t see out the dining room window, he never stopped trying. He never understood that he wasn’t the biggest dog in the house, either.
One time Lynne left a bag of groceries on a stool in my kitchen while we went out to run an errand. When we got home, the groceries were all over the kitchen and an entire box of croutons had been eaten, along with half a roll of toilet paper. I’m not saying Hamlet didn’t get in on the action, too, but only Brutus had crouton breath and a stomach so distended that he when he tried to jump up in a pose similar to the one in this photo, his front legs couldn’t make it more than a couple inches from the floor.
Silly dog.
In this photo: my father’s brother Dwight, their father, and their sister Drexel. They were together for Father’s Day; only a few months later, my grandfather died at age 96. See Papa’s ears? Gonna have a pair just like them if I live to be 96.
Here’s Uncle Gerald, my earliest writing mentor. I never knew him when he was this age, but I selected this photo because of a resemblance my sister noted between him and our nephew. I think she’s on to something. It’s interesting to see people from throughout my life looking back at me from a new generation. It isn’t only physical characteristics I notice. Speech patterns, ways of moving or holding the body, facial expressions–these link the family kids to relatives they never met, never saw, so aren’t consciously imitating. I remember when Josh was a toddler and was walking across the yard one day, my mother looked at him and said, “He walks exactly like Papa [my father’s father].” Papa died seven years before Josh was born.
Is it innate, the different way we carry our books according to our gender? I have to admit that in all my years of seeing students pre-backpack, it’s most often done this way. Does it have something to do with the different ways our body strength develops?
