HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
Oct. 12, 2005 As I work on my eighth novel, it hit me that I’ve created dogs in all but three of them. Each dog is loaded with personality, and I use them as tools: their antics sometimes help keep a story line from being too serious (I don’t want my readers to slit their wrists after reading my books!), or keep a single scene from being too formulated or sappy. I’m not a huge dog person, but many dogs have touched my life in the last 39 years, leaving me with plenty of fodder to create a hundred more: My first dog, Puggie, had been my mother’s since she was eleven. He was part-Collie, part-Chow, so if you can picture what Lassie would look like after being in the clothes dryer, that’s Puggie. At 14, he developed a tumor in his throat and was put to sleep. My next dog came into my life when I was 12. My dad had been remarried a few months, and they got a beautiful champagne-colored part-Shepherd, part-Collie puppy, which they simply named “Dog.” Don’t ask. Dog ran off right before she was a year old, and after nearly a week of scouring the neighborhood in subzero temperatures with my stepmother, we met a neighbor who said they buried a dog days before that they found on the edge of their property. They believed a car hit her. They didn’t know who owned her, so they saved her collar, which turned out to be hers. By the time we got home, our hair was frozen to our cheeks from the wind blowing our tears into it. That spring, Dad brought home another puppy, another Shepherd-mix that he named “Dogs.” The name fazed no one at that point – we were already the weirdest family on the block. Dogs also got loose, was hit by a car, and lived, but she was never right after that. A few months later, she got hold of chicken bones from the trash (which I forgot to push down – my fault!), and I found her choking in our kitchen one hot summer morning. We had no car, so I grabbed the dog, whose tongue was starting to swell, and my stepmother and I ran down the street towards the vet a few blocks away. Mom was eight months pregnant. I was a 14 years old and feeling responsible and helpless as I watched the life fade from Dogs’ eyes while we ran. I knew we wouldn’t make it. Once her eyes were completely vacant and her body went limp, I stopped running and bawled my eyes out as Mom screamed at me right on the street for killing her. This is probably why I only buy boneless chicken today. Since Dog and Dogs were never truly housetrained, it took a few months for the putrid smell to completely leave our house and restore it to its nicotine scent. By mid-fall, Dad brought home a new dog, another pretty Shepherd-Collie mutt. This time we all took a stand and gave the dog a proper name, Brandi. Later that year, Dad got Brandi a little brother, a black Labrador that my brother named Bear. By the spring, the Hughes’ also acquired a gray Sheep dog when my aunt moved South. Marco was too big to keep in the house, so he became an outside dog and was very effective at keeping away the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I vowed to never get a dog I couldn’t keep inside. Marco was friendly, but he barely got any love and attention. Maybe there were just too many dogs and kids at that point. A year later, Bear had to be put down when he developed skin cancer. A few years later, my parents gave Marco to someone who owned lots of land and could accommodate his size. That just left Brandi, who lived for over ten years until she developed cancer. I had moved out of state by then. For a short time, my parents had a Dalmatian, who was so stupid he ran in the other direction when you called his name. After they got rid of him, Dad brought home a Basset Hound from a party. He was full-grown – and housebroken, but he humped everyone’s leg, much to my stepmother’s disgust and my teenaged sisters’ horror. After Woody left, they went back to Shepherd-mixed mutts and got Joe, who developed antisocial disorder – or a good judge of character. He hated certain people on the spot, (I was not one of them!) and had to be locked in the basement whenever people visited. After he finally burst through the basement door upon hearing the voice of one of his “Hated Ones,” they started chaining him to the water heater. Shortly after he broke away from that, he bit someone, and was put down for a dirt nap. Now my parents have Kayla, a sweet, loveable bull terrier that was given to my sister by her boyfriend. She’s around eighty pounds but thinks she’s a five-pound toy breed lapdog. Whenever I visit, I always indulge her, even when she cuts off the circulation in my legs. We’re buddies. She really is a sweetie. I doubt my parents will allow my sister to take her when she moves out. I’ve had Raisin, an Italian Greyhound, for seven years. She’s a toy breed and doesn’t even weigh twenty pounds, but she runs faster than anything I’ve ever seen that wasn’t on Wild Kingdom. She also “boings” in the air like she’s on a pogo stick, and eats anything organic. And she’s not even a Hughes! ------------ About the author: Karyn Hughes has a fiction book published by Authorhouse entitled, Scattered Dreams, which is about a newly single mother who battles ADHD. Hughes is also looking for an agent since she has six other finished novels and one more in the works. All Hughes’ novels are related and could be part of a series. Email: Karynlilly1@comcast.net Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
