Dogs I’ve loved in life and fiction
17 Mar 2010 7 Comments
in Blog Book Tour, Julie's Paintings, Memoir, Nature and gardening Tags: cats, dogs German shepherds, Eldercide, Golden retrievers, Jack Russell terrier, Julie Lomoe, Karen Walker, Lunesta, Memoir, Mood Swing: The BIpolar Murders, Shepherd mix
Congratulations to Karen Walker, winner of my 50,000 hits contest. Though Karen lives across the country, we’ve shared a lot over the past year through the Blog Book Tours group. I invite you to visit her wonderful blog, Following the Whispers. Here’s the post I contributed to her blog for my Blog Book Tour last November.
Truth can be stranger than fiction:
the tragic saga of Lucky, my golden retriever
Lucky and Me (Author photo for Mood Swing: The Bipolar Murders) Courtesy Hot Shot Photos
Dogs have long played a central role in my life and my fiction but Lucky, the beautiful golden retriever in my author photo for Mood Swing: The Bipolar Murders, may have been the last dog I’ll ever own. Six months after the photo was taken, he died of lymphoma, and in the years since then, I’ve switched to cats. Setting up this Blog Book Tour, reading my hosts’ reactions to the photo, I realized I’d never written about Lucky. Since Karen’s blog focuses on memoir and nonfiction, this seems like the perfect time.
But Rishi, the dog before Lucky, deserves pride of place. He’s a major character in Mood Swing. In fact, his image is in my cover illustration, and his name is the first word in the first chapter:
Rishi was halfway out the window and onto the fire escape when I tackled him. Arms around my dog’s massive shoulders, I groped for his choke chain and yanked hard. Half a dozen pigeons flapped skyward, squawking.
I described him on Page 2:
He’s leaner and rangier than a German shepherd, stockier than a Doberman, bigger than a Rottweiler. Despite his forbidding looks, he’s a basically friendly beast, but sometimes it’s in my best interests not to let people know that.
That last sentence was literary license. Rishi was wonderfully affectionate and loving, but only to our immediate family, and he was never adequately trained. Despite a near-death experience with a neighbor’s hammer that left a permanent dent in his skull, Rishi lived nearly ten years, a good long life for a big dog. But his death threw me into a deep depression.
Enter Lucky, a year or so later. He came into our lives with what seemed at first to be joyous synchronicity. At a Woodstock party given by friends of my daughter Stacey, someone mentioned having a golden retriever who needed a new home. I was instantly intrigued – we’d owned a beautiful golden named Shawna when Stacey was a child, and except for her propensity to chew up the woodwork during thunderstorms, she’d been a wonderful member of the family.
Right after the party, I paid a home visit to meet Lucky, fell instantly in love, called my husband on my cell, and within a week we had a beautiful four-year-old male golden. He came with a tragic back story: he’d been the beloved companion of an 84-year-old man who lived alone in the Catskills, and when the man was hospitalized, one of the nurses befriended both him and Lucky. Shortly after the man’s discharge, he was brutally murdered by a neighbor he’d known and trusted for years, a handyman in search of money for drugs.
The nurse took Lucky in, and in turn passed him on to the folks who gave him to us for adoption. The poor dog was threatening the family’s togetherness. They already had a couple of young kids, a poodle and a cat, and a rambunctious young retriever sent them over the top. The husband’s job took him on the road a lot, but when he was home, he told us, he and Lucky slept together downstairs while the wife, kids, poodle and cat slept upstairs. Not exactly a prescription for marital bliss, so Lucky had to go.
Soon after the photo session with Lucky, his health began spiraling downward. He couldn’t seem to keep food down, and he was weakening and losing weight. After extensive testing, the vet diagnosed lymphoma. In a futile attempt to buy more time, we opted for extensive – and expensive – surgery. In retrospect, that was a mistake, but he’d been so young, so lovable, that we thought it was worth the gamble.
He died in early fall. We buried him in the garden out back, marked the spot with a marble plaque bearing an iris design my husband had carved years before. I planted dozens of bulbs – crocus, daffodil, and hyacinth – and they’ve bloomed luxuriously in the three years since.
Dogs play a major role in both my novels, but they never, ever come to a bad end. In fact the villain in my suspense novel Eldercide nearly refuses an assignment when he thinks it might mean harming the victim’s Jack Russell terrier. And I could probably never write that scene where the neighbor tries to murder Rishi with a ball peen hammer, with me coming between them, shrieking that he’ll have to kill me first, screaming bloody murder until the neighbors call 911 and the police arrive. On the other hand, maybe enough time has passed – and after all, the dog survived in the end.
As I write, my cat Lunesta is writhing around on the desk next to my computer, tempting me to rub her tummy and doing her best to bat the mouse out of my hand and onto the floor. Does she sense I’m writing about dogs? Is she demanding equal time? For now, she’ll have to wait.
Post script five months later: it’s a beautiful spring day, and the green shoots of the crocuses, daffodils and hyacinths are pushing out of the ground atop Lucky’s grave. Lunesta is sleeping in a basket by my side, soaking up the sunshine.
I did the cover illustrations for both my books, by the way. The medium is pastel.
How about you? Any pet stories you’d like to share? Have your pets played a role in your fiction?
Mother Nature turns nasty, mirrors my mood
27 Nov 2009 2 Comments
in Art of Writing, Miscellaneous Musings, Nature and gardening Tags: Burchfield Penney Art Center, Charles Burchfield, Cooperative Extension, Julie Lomoe, Sisters in Crime, viburnum leaf beetle
Charles Burchfield
Outside my office window this morning, the lake is sparkling in the distance and the sun is breaking through the gray November clouds. In the immediate foreground, there’s the rotting skeleton of a dead oak tree that really needs to come down. Caught in its branches are the severed limbs of a maple that came crashing down in a recent windstorm that whipped in from the south. Part of it landed on my little red kayak, which now has a concave bottom. It’s probably still usable, though I haven’t tried to find out. The tree bounced off the house, but didn’t do serious damage, and amazingly, it missed my beloved contorted filbert tree, also known as a Harry Lauder’s walking stick because of its twisted branches.
Technically, both dead trees are on our neighbors’ property. They’re nice people but they’re of modest means, and they don’t own a chainsaw. We’ve got a good one that’s been out of commission for years, and my husband finally dropped it off at the hardware store for an overhaul. If we don’t get that dead oak down before winter, it might fall smack dab onto the roof and into my office. Because the wind usually blows from the north, we’d thought it was in a protected spot between the two houses, but the storm in October proved us wrong.
Speaking of oak trees, there’s a living one out by the street. Raking up beneath it, I found hundreds of spiky little spheres clinging to the fallen leaves. At first glance they looked like baby wooly bear caterpillars curled into balls, but when I gingerly pulled one from a leaf, squeezed and examined it, I realized it was of vegetable rather than animal origin. But what was it? Some kind of gall or chancre, probably. In the ten years we’ve lived here, I’ve never seen it before. I need to do some online research, or maybe call the Cooperative Extension, to identify it and see whether it poses a danger to my perennials. Maybe it’s something that’s moved north with global warming.
Charles Burchfield
Back in the summer I identified another toxic invader I’d never seen before. Something stripped my cranberry viburnum bare virtually overnight, reducing the leaves to skeletal filigree. Looking more closely, I saw tiny caterpillars, less than an inch long. Master Gardeners of my acquaintance identified the culprits – viburnum leaf beetles, another newcomer to our region. Like the blight that has wreaked havoc with this year’s tomatoes, the nasty creatures migrated here from the west. Although I normally avoid insecticides, I bought a potion specifically designed for these and similar beetles, and drenched the ground in a circle around the bush. I’m supposed to repeat the ritual next spring, but although the viburnum bravely put out a second batch of leaves, it may already be beyond saving if live insects are wintering underground. I won’t know till next May or June.
All this destruction and disease seems apropos as an extended metaphor for my mood in the wake of the Sisters in Crime meeting I stormed out of last Saturday. I know there’s a name for this usage of images from nature to mirror human emotions, but I wasn’t an English major – maybe someone out there can tell me what it’s called.
Almost a week has passed. The rage that drove me to split from that meeting has abated, and that’s a good thing, because all those toxic emotions were having a devastating effect on my physical and mental health. Fortunately I’ve developed ways to banish negativity from my mind. The passage of time helped. So did the positive feedback and support I’ve received from my online community of writer friends, the wonderful day I spent with my daughter and granddaughters in Woodstock, and a Thanksgiving that reminded me of all the blessings in my life.
What fate’s in store for the Mavens of Mayhem, our Upstate New York Chapter of Sisters in Crime? It will probably survive, albeit without me, but like the diseased oak and viburnum, it’s under siege and currently on the verge of a long winter’s nap. I have some further thoughts on the subject, especially on the uneasy alliance between authors and fans, but for the time being, I’m consigning the Mavens to the deep freeze of a cryogenic limbo.
Today’s paintings are by Charles Burchfield, a fascinating American artist of the generation of Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe. Burchfield’s landscapes have an uncanny way of reflecting human emotions. There’s a new museum in Buffalo named in his honor, the Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College – well worth a visit if you find yourself in western New York State.
