Retriever
by Faith Shearin

My father, in middle age, falls in love with a dog.
He who kicked dogs in anger when I was a child,
who liked his comb always on the same shelf,
who drank martinis to make his mind quiet.

He who worked and worked—his shirts
wrapped in plastic, his heart ironed
like a collar. He who—like so many men—
loved his children but thought the money

he made for them was more important
than the rough tweed of his presence.
The love of my father's later years is
a Golden Retriever—more red

than yellow—a nervous dog who knows
his work clothes from his casual ones,
can read his creased face, who waits for
him at the front door—her paws crossed

like a child's arms. She doesn't berate him
for being late, doesn't need new shoes
or college. There is no pressure to raise her
right, which is why she chews the furniture,

pees on rugs, barks at strangers who
cross the lawn. She is his responsible soul
broken free. She is the children he couldn't
come home to made young again.

She is like my mother but never angry,
always devoted. He cooks for his dog—
my father who raised us in restaurants—
and takes her on business trips like

a wife. Sometimes, sitting beside her
in the hair-filled fan he drives to make
her more comfortable, my father's dog
turns her head to one side as if

thinking and, in this pose, more than
one of us has mistaken her for a person.
We would be jealous if she didn't make
him so happy—he who never took

more than one trip on his expensive
sailboat, whose Mercedes was wrecked
by a valet. My mother saw him behind
the counter of a now-fallen fast food

restaurant when she was nineteen.
They kissed beside a river where fish
no longer swim. My father who was
always serious has fallen in love with

a dog. What can I do but be happy for him?

The wonderful writer Barry Hannah died last week of a heart attack. If you've not read his short stories, you're missing a great treat. He was loved by many, both as a writer and as a mensch. The good words about him are coming in from all over. One story is particularly telling, especially for those of you with artistic aspirations but who spend too much time procrastinating. In case you don't know, a 'galley' is what a publisher sends you to make final corrections in before your book is published. One of Hannah's writing students drank too much. Everyone knew about it but didn't say anything until Hannah met this student late one weekday night in a downtown bar. The student was drunk.Hannah went up to him and said, "You shouldn't be here; you should be at home editing your galley."
The student said "But I don't have a galley-- I haven't even finished writing my novel yet."
Hannah said, "There you go."
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here's a link to one of Hannah's most famous stories, "Water Liars"

http://gardenandgun.com/waterliars
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"Reading and writing train our people for logic, grace, and precision of thought, and begin a lifelong study of the exceptional in human existence. I think literature is the history of the soul. Writing should be a journey into worthy perception."

Barry Hannah

Gate C22
By Ellen Bass

At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he'd just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she'd been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching--
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn't look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after--if she beat you or left you or
you're lonely now--you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman's middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.

A small thing that makes me sad: years ago I bought a tattered postcard at the Vienna flea market for the equivalent of five cents. From the moment I saw it in an old shoebox, it was so captivating that it held me in its thrall a long time. Eventually during a move to a new apartment the postcard was lost and I never found it again. The photo on it was of beautiful young woman wearing a 1920's hairdo and clothes, sitting flanked on either side by two handsome men in wrinkled French Foreign Legion uniforms. Real BEAU GESTE or THE ENGLISH PATIENT stuff. The sepia photograph must have been taken in the 20's or 30's in a barren desert camp somewhere, judging from the background. I always wondered what the backstory of the picture could be. Was one of the men her husband or brother that she had journeyed from Paris or London to visit? Or were both men Legionnaires who had met and fallen in love with her out there in the middle of that desolate nowhere? Naturally the eventual resolution of their triangle had to be tragic or triumphant or... Perhaps she was a nurse who volunteered to work in that end of the world spot-- One of those impossibly brave and adventurous women like Beryl Markham, Lee Miller, Tina Modotti or Isak Dinesen. I loved that photograph. Often I played with the idea of writing a book around it.
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interesting concept for a book:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V4QrekU1Wk&fmt=22

One of life's small sad facts is there are people we no longer see who nevertheless gave us some of our best or most important experiences; but they don't know it and never will. That's because we didn't know it ourselves until much later, looking back. She thought about the summer in Greece almost thirty years before when they were together and flew from island to island on cheap rattle'y propeller planes whenever they felt like it. They stayed in ten dollar rooms with the toilet outside down the hall.They read wilted, water-stained books while sitting next to each other on the small balconies off the rooms. Or they sat silently together in complete peace while staring at the sea. No matter what kind of accomodations they rented, there always seemed to be a view of the sea. Every day they ate salads of tomatoes, olives, and thick chunks of chalk-white feta cheese drizzled in fresh olive oil for lunch. They rented a blue Vespa. They walked on black volcanic sand. He bought them baseball caps because the Greek sun was so intense. She was happy then and knew it. But her heart needed three decades more to understand just how happy she had been-- Hall of Fame-happy, once in a lifetime-happy. By the time she came to that realization he was many years gone. One of her final wishes was that she could tell him, thank him for those days together. And if life were magical, which it is not, to sit together again in one of those outdoor tavernas at sunset watching the harbor, the boats, the stars coming out above them, their dinner being prepared, but most especially him.