Dogs Reigning in My Mind (Part 16)

Dorothy Parker was a great American dog woman. She wielded her lap dogs like pistols in bars and salons and always got the last word. If only she was alive today and hosting a contemporary talk show with her dogs. Prince wrote a song about Dorothy Parker and it occurs to me he’d still be alive if he had a dog. Music was his whole life, the world is better as a result, but it wasn’t enough for him. I would have loved to heard a Prince song about his dog.

What does the phrase “the dog had his day” mean? Rupert Brooke answered the question in his charming poem titled, “The Little Dog’s Day.” One stanza reads: He took sinewy lumps from / the shins of old frumps. At the end of the poem, the dog dies In the gloom of the twilight gray but not before doing everything he’d always wanted to do, meaning “the dog had his day.” If you were a dog, what would be “your day?” List those things you’ve always wanted to do but social custom thwarts or prevents.

Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary defined a dog as, “A kind of additionally or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the worship.”

Amen!