Of Dogs and Meaning 2 (another excerpt from my forthcoming book)

In the latest cinematic adaption of Call of the Wild starring Harrison Ford, Buck is entirely rendered with CGI! Dog movies are dead. The Pandemic was the best thing to happen to American dogs. Many people discovered how truly important they are to our mental and physical health and vastly much more effective than an expensive quack therapist or doping up on pills.

While I was teaching English at Taft High School in Lincoln City, one of my students, Jordynn, showed up after school holding a black lab puppy that she had found darting through a skate park while she was skipping class and cruising around riding shotgun in her best friend’s Mustang. Jordynn told me she’d asked her mother if she could keep the puppy and the mother refused. The word had long got out around campus that I owned three dogs and loved dogs, so here she was in my classroom with a dog hidden under her coat! Jordynn begged me to take it. I agreed but made her promise to make posters of the dog and slap them around the skate park. The deadline was tomorrow morning. She agreed and I took a shot of the dog with a digital camera and printed it out for use on the poster. The next morning, Jordynn showed me the poster and said she and her friend had taped up the poster all over town. An owner never came forward. I kept the puppy for a week, but didn’t name her. A teaching colleague adopted her. I guess it was called a “teaching moment” and I found most of the memorable ones rarely had to do with the subject being taught.

In perhaps the greatest dog courtroom scene in television or movie history, Perry Mason, in the “Case of the Golden Oranges” brilliantly employs a large hound named Hardtack and a choke chain in the courtroom to expose the true killer he’s grilling on the stand. Watch the episode!

Perhaps the greatest fine artist of dogs was the French Impressionist, Édouard Manet, who painted a series of eight oil portraits of dogs for his friends between 1875-1883. Manet apparently dashed off these portraits in a matter of minutes when the dogs apparently appeared and interrupted him when he was there to paint another subject! It is unclear if Manet somehow managed to compel the dogs to sit for him (highly unlikely). The portraits are remarkable because Manet’s brushstrokes seem to mimic a dog at play. A beautiful and mysterious woman once painted a watercolor portrait of Sonny the husky (I still have it) and that woman later turned out to be part of my personal extinction and a large reason why I wrote this book on dogs. I wonder if she’ll ever read it, wherever she might be.