To a mouse (with whom I battled last night and then again this morning)

Posted on February 9, 2008 by Steven Dalager

 

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim'rous beastie,
O, what panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!
                    --from "To a Mouse"? Robert Burns

I’m conflicted about Burns here. He has so much empathy for the beastie, an earthy field type (probably in tiny overalls and chewing on a stub of straw) turned up by Burn’s plow. Like Burns, I am generally against chasing wi’ murdr’ring pattle, but for a different reason. Mice give me the heebie jeebies. Unlike Burns, however, I faced the beastie this morning with a gleam of murder in me eye and a pounding heart in my breastie.

There’s a false ceiling in our bedroom. Former residents of this house disguised cracking plaster by dropping down a false ceiling from which 2 x 3 foot insulated tiles hang. There’s even a big translucent panel covering the light. Lying on our bed looking up, one might imagine one is at the office.

victorLast fall, we woke at 2:36 a.m. one morning to the scurry of tiny claws — a track meet in the space between the false ceiling and the plaster. Slumber was scant until Victor slew the beastie a few nights later. He was really a cute little guy hanging by his crushed skull from the jaws of Victor. Brown, smooth fur and a creamy white underbelly — the poor little fella was just trying to come in out of the cold; only to me he was just a miniature RAT.

mouse

Perhaps it’s unfair, but I link mice and rats, and I can’t help but remember the time on the farm that Dad discovered a rat’s nest in the old auger pit next to the granary. The pit had filled with straw and grain over the years, and a family of rats had come to nest there. “Nest”? is such a sweet word, and there was a hoard of little sweeties crawling around in there.rat With shovels poised for smashing, my brothers and I waited while my dad prodded and dug with a pitch fork. I was never as alive as when rats hurtled straight for me, dauntless of my smashing spade. There’s an adrenaline laced satisfaction that comes with the sound and feel of making contact that cannot be duplicated, even by the Wii. There’s an even worse horror when, after that contact, rat continues to scamper on over ones foot. We killed about every other one, I think, the others making it to freedom. My memory records that there must have been over twenty of the buggars. They lay scattered about the yard – fat with grain, pink noses, whiskers. Heebie jeebie. I didn’t sleep too well for a long time, then, either.

There’s also the story of my wife’s grandfather’s encounter with the beastie. He was moving a pile of garbage when ratty shot straight up his pant leg. A better man than I am, he throttled the beastie just before it reached his groin and snapped its neck through his pants with his bare hand. From then on he tied up his pant legs when working at the garbage pile. (Note: This was in a time when garbage was not encased in Rubbermaid, but heaped, and then moved from smaller heaps to larger ones).

I digress. The fella I’d caught above my false ceiling wasn’t a rat, but cousin enough to make me his sworn enemy. That wasn’t the end, either. Victor slew two more before the ceiling went quiet and I figured we were in the clear until next fall, when cold might chase the next mouse family indoors.

Wrong. Two nights ago, Burn’s beastie was at it again. Scurry. Scurry. Scurry. Time for Victor.

2:36 a.m. this morning we were wakened by the snap. It was a solid, satisfying snap, finality and mortality in one instant. Only, wait.

Drag. Drag. Silence. Drag. (repeat)

Turns out mousie was not dead. I proposed to Sherry that I lift the tiles and go after it wi’ murd’ring pattle and a pair of gloves, but since my in-laws were in town and in the next room, she counseled that we avoid making a racket, sleep elsewhere, and tackle it in the morning. Cruel, but I figured mousie would die soon enough.

This morning when I found her, poor mousie had pulled herself up above the plaster through a hole, but Victor wouldn’t follow. Her left rear leg and tail were trapped; I suppose it was like me pulling a storm door around with a broken leg. I’m feeling pity and remorse as I write this (as you can see, mousie has morphed from it to she), but at the time, I was all about murd’ring.

The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men Gang aft agley.

I expect she’ll die, which she certainly hadn’t planned. The stench will be unpleasant, methinks, but I faintly hope she returns to the bosom of her family and lives. In the mean time, on advice of my father-in-law, I’ve set the Victor cluster bomb — three traps set in a circle so that when she jumps away from the first”�snap!

An’ forward, tho’ I canna see, I guess an’ fear!

Posted in General Musings, Personal History | 2 Comments

Sabbatical Notes From Underground: Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Posted on February 4, 2008 by Steven Dalager

PedagogyI first read Paulo Freire 17 years ago in graduate school. What I remember was that Pedagogy was challenging and difficult to apply to an American context, but it also transformed how I saw my relationship to students and clarified the real purpose of literacy education for me. I didn’t think of teaching composition as teaching literacy back then, and it was an important shift in my thinking. Over the years, I’ve sort of lost track of that thread, and so I decided to begin my sabbatical by rereading Freire. It was a good decision.

Freire doesn’t use the word “literacy”? once in Pedagogy; instead he talks about “problem posing education”? in which people learn to “name their world.”? In this process, oppressed peoples in solidarity with teachers experience conscientization and begin to transform their world. Freire calls this combination of thought and action praxis. In the developing world, praxis amounts to revolution — people recognizing the value of their humanity and taking power back from oppressors. (Ideally, oppressors would be transformed as well, but Freire notes that this is unlikely as it would require them to relinquish power. Nobody wants to do that.)

freire

In the context of teaching developmental writing and composition at an open enrollment institution like an American community college, there’s much to be learned from revisiting Freire. Freire worked with oppressed peoples in his native Brazil, and then Chile (after he was invited to leave Brazil by the Brazilian government). In the book, he also refers to Castro’s revolution in Cuba and Mao’s revolution in China. These are places where the contrast between the “oppressors”? and the “oppressed”? was profoundly violent in ways that Americans probably don’t fully appreciate. That said, many argue that the gap between rich and poor in America in 2008 is wider than we care to admit, and getting wider. Furthermore, the students that come to an open enrollment institution like Lake Superior College, where I teach, come predominately from the latter group.

What my colleagues and I typically think of ourselves as doing for our students is this: we equip them with tools they need to compete successfully in a world controlled by oppressors. Part of this sounds very noble – until we get to the part about who’s in control. Very few open enrollment students become oppressors, and clearly we fail our mission if they do. More likely, our successful students will join a working middle class, and essentially become tools of oppressors. Our unsuccessful students? Well, they’ll return to the netherworld from which they came. In either case, the world will remain largely unchanged.

What we’re not doing is what Freire suggests: changing our world. Along with our students, Freire suggests we examine our lives and the problems encountered there, and sifting through these problems we discover broader themes that help us understand ourselves and our world. Through this conscientization, we begin to take meaningful action — individually and collectively — to not just transform their personal situations, but transform their world.

This sounds like revolution because it is. In contrast to the violent revolutions of the last century, I’ll argue that in America, we can affect change from the grassroots level by peaceful means, but no such change will be possible without a broad base of enlightened folk, especially including the poor.

Subversive? Yes. Part of our college’s institutional stated mission is to work with business and industry leaders in our community to “train”? people to meet the needs of the local economy. I imagine folks invested significantly in that part of our mission will be alarmed by such talk. I’m nervous writing it, so that makes us even. I don’t think it’s the either/or situation of Freire’s experience where a finite amount of power meant that one group’s gain was another’s loss. I think that when the poor transform themselves through literacy, we all will benefit and no one loses.

I’ll admit that I cringe when Freire quotes Castro and Mao, and holds up their revolutions as examples of folks on the right track. My perception of their communism has been colored, for sure, by an American lens, and from a Recife ghetto, Havana probably looked like a beacon of hope in 1969, but I’m pretty sure both Cuba and China are failed and miserable experiments in utopia. Mao and Castro may have begun with good intentions, but the corruption of power won out in the end. Still, these poor examples don’t negate Freire’s basic principles for me.

In practical terms, I don’t know yet how this can shape my pedagogy as a teacher of developmental writing and freshman composition, but conversations about what a C means and who should be passed on to the next level make me tired. Reading Freire, on the other hand, inspires me.

Posted in Books, Engl 1106, Sabbatical | 3 Comments

Leatherheads of the North

Posted on January 28, 2008 by Steven Dalager

leather

Leatherheads is a little piece of local history by Chuck Frederick of the local News Tribune. I saw a promotion at Barnes and Noble a couple of weeks ago, and I had a gift card burning a hole in my wallet, so I picked it up.

I don’t read a lot of history, especially local history, so it was a little departure. I actually follow sports, especially the NFL, a little closer than I’d like to admit, so it was interesting to think about the early days in the 1920s when this violent game came into it’s own on a professional level. Some things I learned are:

  • College football was around since the late 1800s. The “professional” game was not welcomed by the college ranks.
  • It was probably played just as violently back then, and with far less protection (leather helmet).
  • Teams came and went every season, like the Minneapolis Mariners, the Milwaukee Badgers, the Kansas City Cowboys, and of course, the Duluth Eskimos.
  • The only recognizable teams today from those early years are the Green Bay Packers, the Chicago Bears, and the New York Giants.
  • Teams scheduled their own games, and sometimes bailed out part way through the season.
  • The kicking game was far more revered than it is now. Drop kicking was common (completely unknown now). A guy who could punt the ball was a big star.
  • You could tackle an unfair umpire, knocking him out of a game, with very little repercussion.

The focus is Ernie Never’s Eskimos from Duluth, on the theory that they saved the NFL. I’m not sure that Frederick proves his case, but the Eskimos had two crazy seasons in 1926 and 1927 where they barnstormed around the country, playing only one home game, using Never’s star power to basically promote the league. They were sort of like the Harlem Globe Trotters, except they were beatable.

At times, the reading got a little tedious because most chapters are basically a series of game summaries. In addition to Nevers (who I hadn’t heard of), Frederick also precedes nearly every figure in the book with the word “legendary” at one time or another, such as the legendary Johnny “Blood” McNally, or the legendary Ole Haagsrud. As Frederick admits in his introduction, records were scarce and unreliable, and interviews often conflicted, so it’s no surprise, perhaps, that “legendary” is the watchword for the book.

Still, it’s a fun read, and it made me hanker for the days of yore when Johnny Blood could get caught reading poetry in his boxer shorts to some fans on a street corner in the snow. Pep talks with Payton Manning aren’t quite the same.

Posted in Books | 2 Comments

On a spider turning 18

Posted on January 25, 2008 by Steven Dalager

eighteen

Kylie turned 18 yesterday. We all woke up this morning and raced through the customary scramble to get to school as though nothing had changed, but something has. I just haven’t figured out exactly how.

The cliché regarding this passage, and it’s absolutely true, is that it seems like yesterday we were holding her for the first time. Her birth was pretty typical, really. There were 20 hours of brutal labor (which I can’t imagine). There was the relief of an epidural (which I also can’t imagine). There was my mother-in-law efficiently kneading Sherry’s back between contractions, briskly but gently humming a fight song, possibly “Cheer, Cheer for Old Grygla High,”? though not “Hurrah for the Red and White.”? There was the doctor who was summoned just after midnight, then called again 45 minutes later because he’d fallen back to sleep. Poor sleepyhead. He was there for the birth, so I bear no animosity. There was my first glimpse of her hairy crown, and her struggle to get past the ears which I blamed on genetically large Peterson ears (turns out her ears were of normal size, so I was wrong on that one). Finally, at 2:36 a.m. she was out, a red squawking spider of arms and legs, messy, adorable, the center of the universe, and it feels like yesterday.

trees

It also feels like yesterday that she was about five years old, watching The Lion King or maybe Aladdin, and so mesmerized that, though she was terrified during the climactic scenes, she could not tear herself away. She’d watch the final scenes of those movies peeking out from behind the sofa, trembling but commanding her parents not to turn the movie off.

Yesterday there was also junior high, angst filled and complete with fiery email

wr

missives regarding how unfair (aka: stupid) her parents are. Somewhere in here she discovered injustice on a broader scale, too, and cried for people she’d never met.

Then there’s been high school, real problems, real friends, real friends with real problems, real boyfriends with even worse problems, real joy, and very real pain. Did I mention tears? There have been tears. This yesterday bleeds into today, by the way.

The real yesterday, however, she stood on stage performing in Central’s competition One Act play. The brave cast was in front of an audience of boorish peers, and
Kylie was fearless. About eight minutes into the show (these things are precisely timed), she enters on heels, a short skirt, and a wig, saying, “Mrs. Smith, there’s a telephone call for you in the office.”? She does this breathlessly, like she’s a gumshoe’s secretary from a 1940’s radio drama, and the boors believe her. So do I. She’s amazing. Thrilling. Terrifying. Terrific. Like the angel Gabrielle in Sunday School Musical, or perhaps Uma Thurman. In that moment, she’s the exact center of the known universe – unknown, too — and though I don’t know how she got there, I’m glad. Proud.

What happens next is even better. She gracefully steps aside from her moment of glory and helps the rest of the cast blaze, one at a time, each in his or her own moment. By the end, the constellation is just right — each star brilliant and perfectly balanced with the others.

I still don’t know what’s happened in 18 years, but it’s been progress toward something authentically wonderful.

Happy Birthday, little spider. I love you.

Posted in General Musings, Personal History | 6 Comments

Forever Lily

Posted on January 23, 2008 by Steven Dalager

 

LillyMy friend Kathy Fahrion, a great recommender of books, placed this in my hands one day last fall, saying I had to read it. Forever Lilly is Beth Nonte Russell’s memoir of an adoption trip to China, and Kathy, I’m glad I read it.

To be honest, I started it once and laid it aside because it didn’t grab me. Russell sprinkles her adoption narrative with a series of dream sequences that eventually lay out a parallel story set in feudal China. The whole “dream” seemed too Disney to me, like I was reading the first draft of Mulan.

Recently I picked it up again, and it grabbed me when Russell finally meets the baby. Her description of the plight of Chinese orphans, particularly females, is compelling. I have a better understanding of the conditions there for millions of babies, and Russell tells a good story. The details of her first adoption, given the fact that she originally set out as a spectator, are fascinating.

The whole understory that supposes that she’s playing out an unfinished drama from feudal China is still a bit much for me to swallow, but the last two thirds of the book were a great read.

Posted in Books | 2 Comments

Fifteen years of water under the bridge reveals the same river

Posted on January 17, 2008 by Steven Dalager

An offshoot of our Marshallese sojourn last summer was our Hawaiian visit with old friends Dave and Cindy, who we’ve vaguely kept in contact with over the past 15 years. They’re two of the most courageous people that I know.

Dave and Cindy Staley lived kitty corner from us in the old Shiprock High teacher compound back in our Rez days.

Shiprock

From our front yard, we looked over Dave and Cindy’s roof to see Tse’bit’ai (Rock with Wings) itself. Dave and I taught English together, tried (failed) to start a band together, were John Kelly disciples together (see future blog “John Kelly: Man or Myth”), and hiked canyons together. Sherry and Cindy baked bread together, read books together, and had their first babies within a year of each other (Philip is just under a year older than Kylie).

We last saw them in 1992 at the Emmanuel Mission, 14 miles down the roughest dirt road on the Rez (possibly the planet). Rattling our vehicle over those 14 miles, Dave once joked that he and Cindy called it the “road to divorce.” Ironic.

The past fifteen years have seen Dave and Cindy through some rough times. Without going into detail, they’re no longer married and both have new partners. They now live on The Big Island, Hawaii, in the Kona region. To see them, though, they’ve weathered about as much as Shiprock, or Mauna Kea (pick your mountain). They’re great parents to Phil, Ron, and Andy and make a difficult lifestyle look, well, worth living.

Cindy, now Cynthia, lives with her partner, Cindy, north of Kona and works for the TSA at the airport (she knows all of the Homeland Security colors). Off duty, she met us at the airport and took us out to dinner that night with the kids. Though it was clear she had weathered mighty pecular storms, she was the same Cindy we knew fifteen years ago – a person of faith and courage, a mother who knows her children intimately, a person who cuts through the superficial stuff of life. Note how Cindy has acclimatized to Hawaii. She looks cold.

CynSher

Below, you can see the whole group – from the left, there’s Andy, Kyle (a friend), Phil, Ron, Cindy, and a camera-mugging bunch of weirdos.

group

One highlight of the evening was Phil’s description of the day’s catch. He’d caught a sea urchin, which he slowly tormented all day by pulling out it’s spines. Upon our return to it, it looked like this.

urchin

It once looked something like this.

urchin2

Dave, something of a sea urchin himself, met us the next day at the hobby store that he runs with his parter, Sara. The store is called Tioli, which is Italian for Take It Or Leave It (OK , it’s an acronym that’s deceptively Italian). Here, Dave showed us all things remote controlled – airplanes, helicopters, cars – and all things craft or art related.

tioli

Dave used to be a teacher, then a principal, and then one day he just up and walked away into the world of entrepreneurship. Tioli, he describes, is kind of like Cheers in that every day the store fills up with regulars who hang around, playing the remote control simulators or flying real copters around the store until something gets broken. Around noon, someone inevitably brings in some food. No beer, but life is pretty good.

Sing with me. “Making your way in the world to day takes everything you’ve got. Thank goodness for friends with high-tech toys” (doesn’t really work, does it).

Dave was the same old Dave – a wise, loving father; a quietly wicked sense of humor, still caching me off guard; a knack for finding what’s off the beaten path, even in tourist trampled Hawaii. For example, we tried to get a tour of Goodall Guitars (for you, Buck!) and were asked to leave.

Goodall

We ate authentic Hawaiian cuisine at the Pine Tree Cafe, where I ate roast pork and cabbage from a styrofoam box (real food, and not a tourist in sight).

After lunch, we headed up the west side of Mauna Kea (the island is one big mountain, after all) for a hike in the jungle in search of feral pigs and mongoose, both non-indigineous and overrunning the islands. Sunny Hawaii was lost from view in the fog, so being from Duluth, we felt right at home. Emerging from the fog up high, we found this sign, a statement of real Hawaiian hospitality.

sign

We also had lots of dicoveries on a jungle path. For example, we found Kurtz’s hut from Heart of Darkness.

hunghut

Wild ginger.

jungginger

And a clever hidey spot (yikes, someone needs to work on those eyes!).

junghidey

No pictures, but I saw a pack of pigs cross the road, and the mongoose were everywhere.

Some of us, at least, will be heading to the Marshall Islands again in the next few years; therefore, there’s a good chance that we’ll be able to see Dave and Cindy and company again. After fifteen years there were some new bends, and water is flowing in unexpected directions, but it’s great to see the same river, and it will be great to see it again.

Posted in Travel | 3 Comments

The Kite Runner

Posted on January 16, 2008 by Steven Dalager

coverAs usual, I’m several years behind the book club curve, but I finally got around to Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner over break. It’s a definite must read in these times.

The well drawn characters of Baba and Hassan, and riveting, painful scenes move the novel along, but what was most compelling to me was the portrait of Afghanistan as it moved from pre-Russian invasion, through the invasion era, and finally to the Taliban period. I was terribly ignorant of much of this and was particularly struck by two things.

One was the ethnic antagonism between Pashtun and Hazara. I’m forever flabbergasted that such human hatred exists in the world, and forever surprised to find out about a new history of butchery. We’ve been hearing about the genocide in Darfur for awhile now, not to mention the Sunni/Shi’a mess in Iraq, and currently the same news echoes out of Kenya. I grew up loving maps, but I’m realizing again how false the lines of Nations, mostly drawn by the West, divide up the world. It’s not that simple.

The other thing that sticks with me is the violence, duplicity, and oppression of the Taliban. Granted, Hosseini is writing fiction, but I have to believe that the things he portrays are at least a partial reflection of actual Talibanic events. How any group could justify such events as being of God is absolutely unfathomable, except that it’s been done some many times throughout history it shouldn’t surprise anyone. God must get really tired of that.

While the long section about the narrator’s courtship was a tedious contrast to the rest of the novel, and the way that the circularity of events closes was almost too perfect to believe, Hosseini avoids an easy ending. I’m going to read A Thousand Splendid Suns soon.

Posted in Books | 2 Comments

Heart of Darkness

Posted on January 16, 2008 by Steven Dalager

heartCatching up with the classics, and with my daughter and her AP English class, I read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness over break, too. What can I say, except perhaps, “Oh! The horror!”

I remember reading Moby Dick a few years back and feeling the same way. I’m glad I read it, but it wasn’t easy.

As sort of a pre-psychological exploration of “madness,” Kurtz and Marlowe are interesting portraits of someone gone mad with power, and someone obsessed with someone mad with power. It’s also a very damning portrait (unintentional on Conrad’s part, I think) of colonialism. Chinua Achebe long ago labeled Conrad a racist, and rightly so.

There are two other things I found difficult about reading it. One is that Conrad gives no one else besides Kurtz and Marlowe names, a stylistic choice, no doubt, emphasizing that neither character values anything about the world beyond their own obsessions. The other European characters get labels (ie. the manager, the Russian) and the natives are described in barely animalistic terms (hence the racism charge). While I could see Conrad’s reason for this choice, I found it difficult to engage with the novel as a reader. The effect of all these vaguely described characters kept everything at too much of a distance for my liking.

The other barrier for me is that Conrad just tends to prattle on. Hemingway would have captured a ten page Conrad scene in two sentences.

Still, I’m glad to have read it, and I’m looking forward to seeing Apocalypse Now again soon.

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Farewell to Majuro

Posted on December 15, 2007 by Steven Dalager

Below is some video from our last night on Majuro with Maritha’s family.  We were able to hold a party at our hotel in a Tiki hut called Boknake.  It’s about four minutes long (if you’re gaging whether it’s worth hitting Play).

[youtube]lT0EtFm61FQ[/youtube]

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Pepper, 67

Posted on December 7, 2007 by Steven Dalager

Pepper

Pepper, 67, Duluth, died Tuesday, December 4, 2007. Born June 2, 1998 in Austin, Minnesota to Chispa, she was our companion for over nine years. It was a complete surprise. Monday, she was fine.

Sherry came home from school Tuesday and Pepper wouldn’t stand up or move, and her breathing was labored. Not knowing what to do, Sherry got her outside somehow where she lay on the deck while Sherry tried to shovel. We had 16 inches of snow that afternoon. Some of it piled up on Pepper as she lay and watched Sherry work.

When I got home shortly after, our vet had told Sherry we needed to go the the Emergency Vet Clinic because they were about to close and the snow was intensifying, so we headed out into the snow. We put her on the floor of the car, but before we could get in, in classic Pepper fashion, she pulled herself into the driver’s seat. We figured she’d be OK. Perhaps she’d swallowed another Lindy Rig (Thanksgiving, 2006, she pooped one out. Orange spinner, hook, neatly packed into a turd).

Somehow we got there. In my lap, Pepper was in obvious pain, but still insisted on looking out the window. In stop and go traffic, and by alternate route because of roads clogged with idling vehicles, we got to the clinic where we were informed that the the doctor was two blocks away, snowbound but slowly getting closer.

The assistant took one look at Pepper and put her on oxygen. After awhile, the doctor arrived, and after a brief look, asked us if Pepper might have eaten rat poison because she was bleeding internally. Her abdomen was full of fluid. It was either that or a tumor had burst, either on her spleen or liver. In either case, she said, her chances were not good – slightly better if she’d eaten the rat poison. We decided to conduct a blood test to determine if it was the poison, but the test never happened.

PepperMaiaThe vet returned shortly and told us we’d better come into the back room because Pepper was breathing her last breaths.

When we saw her, she was laid out on the table, unconscious, breathing in occasional spasms. Up until that moment, I still believed this was some minor alarm that she would get through, but seeing her then, we knew this was it. We stayed with her as she slowly went on her way. Sherry was in tears, but I couldn’t feel anything. My hands on her head, I numbly watched the doctor check her heart rate every few minutes. It steadily got slower. Putting her to sleep was hardly an option, she said. By the time they did it, Pepper would probably be gone anyway.

We knew we had to call the girls, so since I was still emotionless, I dialed the number. I talked to Maia, and I was fine. Maia was a rock. I talked to Maritha, and still I was a machine. Maritha was a little shakey. Then Kylie got on and sobbed, and I was blubbering. Pepper was gone. I loved that dog.

We decided against bringing home her ashes in favor of her paw prints pressed into a clay disk. Come spring, we’ll bury it. Until then, some memories.

PepperEyes

Pepper chased basketballs. Early in her career, she chased them all over the yard, never catching them because her mouth was too small. At some point, however, she discovered she could catch them under her abdomen, which she enjoyed to an embarrassing degree. Leaving a basketball out in the yard eventually became a definite no no.

She was also good at fetch. She caught a mean Frisbee, and soaked up my 90 mph fastballs (tennis balls) better than Joe Mauer, but she never caught on to the return part of the fetch game. She always made us chase her to get it back.

She was strictly a dog food diet dog, except on movie night, when Sherry would toss her popcorn, after popcorn, after popcorn…she never dropped one. She also liked any dead and stinking thing she could get her mouth on.

She also had paws that were more like hands. She could lay on her back and hold a chew toy or rawhide as she gnawed, and I could swear she had opposable thumbs.

She was always afraid of men. Any strange male that entered the yard or house was persona non grata, and she was full of threats and bluster for nearly a minute before she would start to fawn skittishly – dying to get some affection from this evil entity, but terrified at the same time. What a weirdo.

She pretty much loved everyone else to the point of annoyance. No hand or ankle went un-licked.

Pepper is survived by many dog friends who will miss her. Early in her life, Jennifer Montgomery’s Scout and Pepper were absolutely amazing. They were about the same age, and when Scout would come to visit, they would chase each other around our Bismarck back yard literally for hours, gnawing on each other’s ears. Weirdos.

Of course, there’s is Pepper’s beloved brother and litter mate, Blizzard, who were also like peas and carrots. There’s also Pepper’s mother, Chispa, who continues to lick her paws down in Austin, and though Pepper outweighed her 6 to 1, insisted on physically demonstrating her dominance well into Pepper’s adulthood.

Other surviving canine pals are Sadie, Abby, Baxster, Luci,  Henry, and Rex (who Pepper could easily best in any fetch game, but she always allowed him to win to protect his ego).

Preceding Pepper to the Afterlife are Buddy, may he rest in peace, and Wilson and Simon, may they also rest in peace, and Amy and Mindy, may they rest in peace.

Pepper touched the lives of many animals and people, mostly with her nose and tongue. She will be missed. I think we’ll give it a week, and then we’ll start vacuuming up dog hair around here.

Thanks for being a great dog, ya moron.

Posted in General Musings | 4 Comments