This By the Book interview with John Waters in Sunday’s New York Times was all kinds of awesome, from his citing Ignatius J. Reilly as his favorite fictional hero to his cranky anticipation of the English translation of the next installment in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle.” But his book recommendation for President Trump was vintage Waters:
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
“Surgery of the Anus, Rectum and Colon,” by J. C. Goligher.
When we adopted Sunshine, we were told she was getting laser treatments to help with her aging hips and joints. I’d never heard of this, but after doing a bit of research decided to continue with it. The first treatment definitely made a difference. It put a little spring in her step. And she got to wear these cool SUNglasses.
Sunshine at the vet during laser treatments.
There are a lot of great reasons to own a dog. But one of the best is that it keeps me active. Want proof? This is from the pedometer on my iPhone. Notice how my step counts drop precipitously after Ozzy’s death in November. Then in April they start to climb again. Walking Sunshine three times a day might have something to do with that …
My step counts for the past year. Notice how it drops off precipitously after November. And the uptick in April? Sunshine arrives at our house.
Sydney and Sunshine occupy the same space. Without drama. We’re starting to think the cockatoo mostly just wants to be part of things. He walked over from his cage while we were sitting out on the porch and perched on the couch, right above Sunshine, and promptly nodded off. More drama a bit later. But I think these two are going to be able to live together.
Sunshine and me, sitting on the front porch
Wake of the flood, laughing water, forty-nine
Get out the pans, don’t just stand there dreaming
Get out the way, get out the way
Here comes sunshine
Here comes sunshine
— Hunter/Garcia, Here Comes Sunshine, 1973
Ozzy’s death hit me hard, and it was a while before I could even consider another dog. But living for the first time in 28 years without a canine companion was more than I could stand. The search began.
I knew I wanted a rescue. I was leaning toward a hiking companion. But other than that, I was open-minded as I perused the dogs at the Friends of Shelter Dogs site as well as the Athens County Dog Shelter’s Facebook page. From there, I drifted on to Petfinder, narrowing my search to a 10-mile radius around Athens.
That’s when Sunshine broke through the clouds.
Sunshine
She wasn’t what I had in mind, a senior great Pyrenees who had led a tough life and found an angel named Cindy at the National Pyr Rescue to foster her. I didn’t reach out, still reeling from Ozzy’s death and worried about the commitment of a new, geriatric dog.
But I kept returning to Petfinder like a Facebook creeper until a notice popped up saying her adoption was pending. I started to move on, still creeping but comforted by the fact that she’d found a home. Then I saw the ad again, and the “pending” notification had disappeared. I sent an adoption application to the rescue organization.
The rest, as they say, is history. We now have an amazing, massive presence in our home. Like Xena, my late, great Newfie, Sunshine is very conscious of her size. She knows how to use it to her advantage, and she’s graceful for a big creature, sorta like an offensive lineman. A beast comfortable in her own skin. I had forgotten how hard a large dog, even an old one with hip pain, can pull when she decides to set course for something fascinating. We’ve been working on that, and hooking her leash to the chest ring on her harness instead of the back made it much easier to steer her. And she’s so eager to please that it’s pretty easy to use praise to get her moving in the right direction.
Lara, Sunshine and me during one of Sunshine’s visits to our house before the adoption. It was love at first sight.
She’s anxious, but not obsessively so. Traffic and sirens still cause concern for this dog who lived most of her life tethered on a short chain out in the wilds of Southeast Ohio. Her progress since she was rescued has been nothing short of amazing, thanks in large part to the work her foster did with her before we adopted her. That work continues, and we’re making great strides.
Sydney tries to let Sunshine know he’s bigger and badder than he looks.
The major challenge now is getting Sydney, our deranged umbrella cockatoo, to come to grips with the fact that he has another canine to contend with. The jealousy is palpable. At least from the cockatoo. The mighty Pyr largely ignores him, preferring to focus on the morsels strewn around his cage. This gets really ugly if Lara forgets and pets Sunshine before Sydney or pays too much attention to the dog. While Sydney will tolerate me whoring around with a canine, Lara must remain faithful to our avian overlord to ensure peace in the kingdom. There have been hissy fits and temper tantrums, but things are settling down.
Sydney is slowly adjusting to the new dog in the house.
It’s wonderful having a giant breed dog lumbering around the house again, and Sunshine’s estimated age of 7-10 might be closer to 7 based on her behavior thus far. She’s in good shape, with the hip problems I’d expect to see in a geriatric giant breed dog. Fortunately, I have a lot of experience here after raising Xena from a pup.
***
On the night Sunshine came to live with us, I flicked on an overhead light near Sydney to beat back the gloom of a spring rainstorm and ran downstairs to see how our new gutters were performing. All good. Then I returned to the front porch to read The New York Times and write about Sunshine.
Suddenly, the clouds parted in an almost biblical way and the sun burst out. A chorus of birds managed to be in perfect harmony as they sang their odes to spring. And that Grateful Dead song from Wake of the Flood bubbled up in my head … Here comes Sunshine … Here comes Sunshine …
Athens weather radar when Sunshine arrived …
Suddenly, the skies clear. Here comes Sunshine!
“Like the ghosts we know from stories, they are tied to their former existences, trapped by an idea of themselves, and can’t leave until they are ready; perhaps you recognize their dilemma from your own life, when you have been stuck between one obsolete version of yourself and the new version waiting just ahead. Maybe all you need is the right push.”
— Colson Whitehead in a review of George Saunders’ novel “Lincoln in the Bardo”
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider …
–Dr. Martin Luther King, Letter From Birmingham Jail (1963)
Some of these works were new last year. Some were just new to me. Considering I spent almost half the year plodding through Gravity’s Rainbow, my reading list wasn’t too bad. Hoping to ramp that up this year. Most of my new music is coming from listening to my favorite radio stations via the Internet: WNCW out of North Carolina. WWOZ in New Orleans and WDVX in Knoxville, TN.
A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe. Fascinating first-person account of London being ravaged by the plague in 1665. I’ve read a good bit about Samuel Pepys, who was a contemporary of Defoe and survived the plague, too. Defoe was only about 5 when this happened and his account is presumed to be based on his uncle’s experiences and considerable research. Then as now, the poor bore the brunt of it while the rich fled and cloistered themselves.
Knockemstiff, Donald Ray Pollock. Before Hillbilly Elegy, there was Knockemstiff. Bleak view of the white underclass in rural Ohio. A few friends, both Ohions, recommended this to me one night when we were drenched in tequila and they were trying to talk me into writing a novel. You have to read Knockemstiff, they said repeatedly. I was dubious but gave it a shot. Loved it. One of those novels that still is percolating around in my head as I watch the events of 2016 fade into the rearview mirror. I haven’t read Hillbilly Elegy yet. Adding it to the 2017 list.Anyway, that’s some of the stuff I obsessed over last year. How about you? Already on the lookout for new influences in 2017. We’ll be going to Mountain Stage again later this month, and we have tickets for Hayes Carll’s show in Nelsonville in February. And once I finish Thinking Fast and Slow I have a lengthy list of books on my list, probably starting with Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. I read a chapter of this in the New York Times last year. I went in dubious (the premise sounded a bit over the top) but I came out determined to read the rest. And I loved Whitehead’s Zone One, an original and fascinating zombie novel.
