Willie Morris and his dog Skip

"My Dog Skip"  is a screen adaptation - and embellishment - of a book by the same name. Written by an author named Willie Morris. 

Willie grew up in Yazoo, Mississippi. The book - and the movie - are a portrayal of life in that tiny town.

Willie's Jack Russell, Skip, is at the center of the stories and recollections of his boyhood.

About the book, critics said Morris's words were "tender reflections on Southern small town culture.."

Tender indeed. His last reflections on skip stir the heart. More on that later.

My Dog Skip is set in 1942.  While war in Europe captures everyone's attention, 8 year-old Willie is having struggles of his own in Yazoo. He's undersized, shy, and ignored at school.  His 9th birthday present, Skip, changes his life.

And that's saying quite a lot since he went on to be a Rhodes Scholar. 

As a boy, the dogs in my life were, sadly, never like Skip.  We inherited our first dog from my grandparents.  But by the time she made it into our house, she was old and overweight, and spent most of her last years sleeping on the landing of our front steps.

Our second dog was a deaf, disturbed dalmatian.  Upon her disappearance, we were told that she was sent to the deaf dog farm, which was surely parental code for something else. 

And then there was Buddy.  I wanted to love Buddy, but his time before coming to us was spent in reform school that didn't work. If dogs could wear leather jackets and ride motorcycles and get dirty tattoos, Buddy would have had all three.  Even the vet that helped us adopt him wanted him put away in the end.  I think he used deaf-dog farm code.

And now to Morris's tender reflections.  In the movie, Morris's words are spoken by Harry Connick, Jr. in narration throughout the film.  Toward the end of the book, his words are crafted with soulful simplicity and sincerity.

"I recieved a trans-atlantic call one day. "Skip died", Daddy said. He and my mama wrapped him my baseball jacket. They buried him out under the elm tree, they said. That wasn't totally true. For he really lay buried in my heart." 

And now, click here to hear Morris's words spoken by Harry:

My Dog Skip URL

The Witch Sisters

The witch sisters were probably born on a piece of scrap mat board from the bin under the cutting table.  Like bluish wisps of Bond Street smoke from my father's pipe, the sisters materialized into our childhoods.  They were among his most lasting and private creations.

The stories were told in varied places.  Some on the front porch swing, accompanied by a sound track of rain and thunder as we watched the really "good" storms.  Some in the station wagon on the road to Tippecanoe, Brown County, or LaPorte.  And of course in countless bedrooms, where the audienced squeezed into a single twin bed, even though there were always at least two in the room. 

They are especially remembered on Halloween.

The three sisters were named Granchubula, Rasstassable and Singesingeable.  We were able to see their pointy hats and warts and flowing black dresses, all drawn on mat board or brown wrapping paper.  Purple was always added somewhere to their clothing.  My father didn't spare any detail, and he often told the stories as he drew the pictures.  Sometimes he would make an elaborate drawing first, enticing his audience into the tale.  The stories were alternately scary and funny.

Granchubula was the matriarch and the oldest sister.  She looked after Singesingeable, the middle sister, and Rasstassable, the youngest.  They lived in an old tree in Mrs. Jacob's huge wooded property next door.  It was said to be a gnarled oak tree with a huge knot at its base.  My sisters would occassionally gather the courage for a foray to see if they could find it.  Of course, my father wouldn't give away the exact spot. 

The witch sisters worked by day in what was known as "The Broom Room".   It was a six story room for making broomsticks.  It had all the required materials - straw, sticks, and whatever else was needed - all carefully illustrated.  The Broom Room was the place where naughty children were taken by Granchubula.  Their punishment was to spend a certain number of hours or days making brooms with the sisters.  When they finished making the brooms, they'd be tested; flown up into the cavernous space.  The punshment seemed to be fairly adminsitered by Granchubula, but resented by the younger sisters.  In fact, Granchubula was often found admonishing her sisters for inapproriate acts; some unseemly even for witches.

Everyone's favorite witch was probably Singesingeable.  She always carried fire - whether it was a lantern, torch, or matches.   She was resentful and confrontational, and would always throw fire on those that got in her way.  Or she'd burn things up.  We loved her.  Rasstassable lived in the shadow of the other sisters and unfortunately I can't seem to remember much about her.  But she had some big personalities in her family and it was easy to get overlooked.

The memories of the sisters are becoming somewhat foggy, like the Halloween scenes they lived in.  But, in retrospect, the most remarkable part about the witch sisters is that a father of seven would find the time and the energy to give them life - and to share his creativity and excitement with all of us.  Which we still all have, thanks to my dad.

On the sleeping car to Tulsa

I don’t know what kind of train it was, but it could have been an Amtrak or a Rock Island or anything. We were huddled together in a sleeping car, our family headed to Tulsa.  I remember lying by the window and watching with fascination as our train clattered past what seemed like every town in America.

I remember the neon signs.  There were planted like so much corn and soybean - Coca Cola, Pepsi, RC Cola. I’m sure there were beer signs too, but I was too young to recognize them.  But it was the sense of isolation I felt in these towns that left a profound impression on me.  Their taverns and frame houses, mom and pop stores, and empty spaces.  The more dismal and remote they were, the more they interested me. I don’t know why – they just did.

There were Edward Hopper diners near the railroad tracks with small town people clustered around the counter. Frame houses with tarpaper walls. And businesses that had tiny windows on upper floors where people lived.  Real people a world away and yet right next to us.

The images I recall now are in the monochromatic tones of my memories from the sixties. It was eerily soothing on that train, like looking out the window of a spaceship into the vastness of space. Protected from the loneliness and the vacuum of those small towns - and it felt comforting.

Last night I traveled to a small town in Michigan.  I inadvertly drove through different neighborhoods, looking for a gas station.  As I wandered, I found a town that looked like a skinny kid who dressed in ill-fitting, outdated clothes but couldn’t afford anything that looked or fit better.  Everywhere, it was evident that there had been no real growth here in decades.

It was surprisingly dismal, even though the protective Michigan trees tried to conceal the fact with their fall ochres and reds.  There were run-down taverns in residential neighborhoods where they shouldn’t be.  Shabby stores with things in the windows that were faded and uninteresting.  As I drove around, I glanced at the small windows in the upper floors of businesses and houses with sagging front porches.  I felt the vacuum and the isolation.  And an unexpected sadness.

One of every eight people in Michigan receives some form of government assistance. Real unemployment levels in towns like this approach 27%, not the 9.5% national average. Youth unemployment numbers are as high as 60%. Those statistics resemble what used to be seen on Indian reservations in places like Oklahoma. Americans thought it reflected poor education, substance abuse, and too much government assistance. And now it’s here in the heartland.

I think back to the sleeping car on the train, and the black and white images as they blur by.  Many of the places I stared at through the windows of the train winding through Iowa, Missouri and Arkansas seemed unreal and even exotic.  On that train, it felt more like the Polar Express or the train to Hogwarts.  Not like the ride here in the real world and in this town.

The lonely outpost

U.S. General Stanley McChrystal has asked for up to 40,000 more troops in Afghanistan.  He says that in part it's needed to defend our current troops against an increasingly violent insurgency and in part to bring a successful outcome to the war.  "Although considerable effort and sacrifice have resulted in some progress, many indicators suggest the overall effort is deteriorating," McChrystal said of the war's progress.

Against a picturesque backdrop of poppy fields, American troops saw more casualties this week than at any point since the war began in 2001.  The poppies fuel a drug enterprise that is the economic engine of the country and the empowering force behind local warloads that divide and rule some of the most remote and distant terrain imaginable.

Few americans know much about the geography of Afghanistan.  So let's compare it to South Vietnam, since there are other similarities.  South Vietnam is 67,000 square miles, mostly at sea level.  Afghanistan is 250,000 square miles, with altitudes from 4,000 to 20,000 feet.  There are 19M people in South Vietnam and 28M in Afghanistan.  It is said that as bad as Vietnam was, the troops were never far from emergency assistance - from helicopters, other troops, or artillery.  In Afghanistan, many military units say that when help is needed, it is not readily available or nearby.  And that many helicopters cannot reach the higher altitudes when they're called.

At one point, the U.S. had nearly 550,000 troops in the Vietnam conflict.  There were 58,000 casualties (KIA or MIA) and over 90,000 wounded.  In Afghanistan, the U.S. has lost over 800 soldiers (KIA), and the total number of wounded exceeds 3,400.   Considering that U.S. soldiers covered less ground in Vietnam, it is amazing that there are only 60,000 troops laboring in Afghanistan today (only 32,000 from the U.S.).  

Who has the will to fight this conflict?  Not the average American family with teenage boys.  Not the politician that wants to be re-elected.  Not the Canadians or French or British.  But that's no reason to leave our soliders stranded on a mountain or in a poppy field.  In fact, some military analysts offer that given the geography and the nature of the war (an insurgency conflict) our troop levels should be more like 600,000.  But there are only 60,000.  What is accurate and what is political rhetoric?  Obama is justifiably thinking very carefully about the answer to that question.

There have been arguments for using more drones and fighting a more technology-based conflict.  But on October 4, 2009, when tribal militias and Taliban fighters over-ran a remote outpost, they killed 8 americans primarily by the sheer number of attackers.  The soldiers defending the outpost fired so much ammunition that many of their weapons overheated and became useless.  And while air support did eventually arrive, it was not soon enough to save the 8 soldiers. 

How does more technology help defend an outpost 20 miles from the Pakistan border?   Some type of high-tech barbed wire?   I think of my 18 year old son, and how shocked and outraged I would be if he was unprotected and in danger in a lonely outpost like that.

So, we either need better - or more - technology or more troops to protect our sons and daughters who are fighting a war in a country three times larger than South Vietnam - with about 10% of the soldiers deployed there.  And by all accounts, we lost that war.

Air Force One and the Sun

At the Sarasota airport today, I am looking at Air Force One.  It is a massive 747 jumbo-jet.  The top is painted bright white.  The tail displays the American flag.  The middle layer of color is lavender-blue.  And the rest of the gigantic plane is the cerulean color of the Florida sky.  The cockpit towers three stories above the tarmac.  The engine cowlings are decked out in chrome, like a Harley.   "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" is written in kerned letters spaced with a dignified authority.  The circled presidential seal is under the forward windows.

A cluster of reporters with telephoto lenses can be seen sequestered a hundred yards out from the terminal.   Four helicopters appear in the scattered clouds on the far side of the airport.  Deep bass thumps are heard through the windows as they get nearer.  They land and taxi to positions on either side of the plane.  These are dark green and obviously armed military aircraft.  "UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS" is painted under the slooping propellors.  When the helicopters taxi to a stop, groups of men dressed in black fatigues and carrying gym bags jog to their black Chevy Suburbans.

There is more thumping and a new speck appears on the horizon.   It materializes as a smaller, less menacing Marine helicopter, sleek and pointed like a green reptile.  It lands on the stark concrete and remains motionless.   It's the decoy helicopter.  Another speck appears in the sky.  This is the real one.   It lands and the propellers spin down.   A marine in dress blues opens the door, and several men get out.  One of them is tall and athletic, and he takes long strides toward the reporters.  It's Obama.  He walks alone, with his entourage behind him. 

Surprisingly, he reaches the reporters, stops for a few moments, and turns back toward the steps of the blue plane.  Obama skips up the steps to his flying office.  He does so purposefully and energetically.   He turns and waves; and with a forest of antennas from television vans in the foreground, climbing into the sky, he disappears into the plane.

Passengers turn back from the windows to the gate agents and the boarding process.  The worlds returns to a comparatively boring reality.  For a few minutes, Air Force One brought us a sense of purpose and urgency and power.  It seems to trivialize our own lives.  It's neurotic, but I guarantee you that everyone in the airport feels that to a certain degree.

As Air Force One takes off, I am thinking that maybe Florida will be getting its groove back.  I wonder why it took Barack Obama to remind us that our principal export is sunshine.  That the same photons that sunburn tourists and grow organges and heat the gulf can produce millions of gigawatts of clean energy.   That we can do more than the infant solar farm in Arcadia.   That perhaps the developers and the banks that have built the empty houses and condominiums across this state can now focus on a new commodity.   No house flips.  No scams.  Just sunshine - and power.

Photoshop Camelot

Today Julie was watching a documentary called "24 hours after the JFK assassination.  It chronicled the events that altered our childhoods - and our society - after a gunman (or gunmen) put three bullets into our president on a fall afternoon in 1963.  The program included the same grainy and fuzzily-lit images that appeared on black and white televisions all over the world as the events unfolded.  Today those images look like they've been photo-shopped to make them more eerie and unreal.  Ironically, they're similar in their other-worldliness to those of the Apollo moon landings six years later in July of 1969.  

They are odd, grainy, monochromatic images.  Dallas police driving around in their black cruisers with single lights on top.  Everyone wearing black suits and skinny black ties.  A small-town looking Parkland Hospital emergency room.  And everyone , including the reporters on camera, smoking.  

But there are a few color images, and they seem to always include Jackie.  Jackie accepting roses from someone near Air Force One.  Jackie smiling and waving from the limosine.  Jackie in her pink dress and pill box hat.

As the people moved from shock to anger to mourning, countless millions witnessed Jackie's composure in those televised scenes and drew strength from the woman who represented their camelot.   A figure loved by history and beloved by a generation.  

And now there is a book by C. David Heymann that claims that Jackie had a nearly four-year affair with Robert Kennedy.  I'm not saying I believe it.  I don't want to.  But he claims he "spent nearly two decades researching the book, even digging through old FBI and Secret Service files about the clandestine couple. Tapes of his exhaustive interviews are available at the SUNY Stony Brook library."

Look, Robert Kennedy was a father of 11 children.  His brother was assassinated.  And if there is truth to the story, she had an affair with him less than six months after his brother was killed.   I'm not saying I believe it, but the book also quotes Truman Capote as saying, "It was the coming together of a man and a woman as a result of his bereavement and her mental suffering at the hands of her late, lecherous husband."  Oh man.

Then in 1968, shortly after Robert is assassinated as he walks through a kitchen in San Francisco, Jackie marries Aristotle Onassis.  Five years after her husband was killed, she marries a foreign business tycoon.  She marries a man who publicly fueded with the Kennedies - especially Robert Kennedy.   Many believe she was given a pass by the public.   They loved her.   They forgave her.

Perhaps a generation of Americans have found that, like themselves, Jackie was a normal human being.   That Camelot was only as real as magazine covers.  Because people wanted it to exist.   But that the real world was actually in those grainy, lonely images we watched on TV.   And that the iconic woman that people remember in her pink and yellow dresses and matching pillbox hats was extraordinary, but not perfect. 

Aqua Dog

Rocket takes a late afternoon swim with Tommy

Rocket blasts off

Rocket the dog went happily into his crate at 10pm and, like our other children never did, slept through the night.  He failed the cat test for day two (not even a D-) and baby looked like he was posing for a Halloween picture.  Rocket ventured into the pool.  He chewed through three expensive toys and gagged up some kind of red plastic thing.  He also ate the cat's treats that Julie put our because she felt sorry for them.  "Where are those treats I left out for the cats?" 

We'll be back to the store today to get some rawhides!

Rocket Man

Today we have a new dog, Rocket. He was adopted from the Human Society of Sarasota. He is allegedly a Mountain Cur (as in red neck squirell hunting dog from North Carolina) but we suspect he is Lab mix. He is seven months old and already aging Julie years in the short time we've had him. He sits, shakes hands (paws), and flunked his cat scan test (getting along with cats). We're not worried, baby will be stalking him soon. Tonight it's the crate and the Ambien - we have to try it or he will eat the dishwasher while we're sleeping. The happy note is that he absolutely positively bétter than Molly so far.

Ichabod Crane at Third Base

Last night we were watching the Yankees game.  OK, not together, but virtually together.  I was in a hotel and Andrew and I were exchanging texts.  Julie, would call me when something really interesting happened.  Which did.  A few times.

First, Nick Swisher (from the Yankees) was tagging up on third on a fly ball.  He scored.  But the Angels said he left early and the umpire at third, Tim McClelland, called him out.  On the replay, it appeared he did not in fact leave early.  They have a jumbo-tron screen in the outfield, and they showed the replay about 10 times.  On the big screen, it showed an Ichabod Crane-looking McClelland not even looking at the base.  There's a picture of the base with Nick Swisher - with Ichabod looking straight into the outfield and not at the Nick's foot.  Forty thousand fans watching.  No, wait, more like twenty million on the big, big screen. 

A few innings later, Ichabod was standing on third and probably thinking about some headless horseman somewhere.  When he looks up, he's startled to find that there are two Yankees standing near third base but neither is actually on the base.  The Angels catcher tags both of them with the ball.  Both are out, right?  Crane/McClelland, looking to play it safe, decides to call one of them out and one of the safe.  One hundred percent chance to get it fifty percent right. 

By this time, the world was wondering if Ichabod maybe needed to drink a Monster between innings.   The jumbo-tron replays pathetically showed the evidence another 10 times.  The umpires just stood with their arms crossed and pretended like they didn't see (or weren't allowed to look at) the gigantic video evidence.  I am thinking back to the old SNL skit, where they do the bubble-thoughts of Bill Swerski, the Bears fan, and he's looking really focused but thinking, "Ditka, Ditka, Ditka..."  We don't know what inside of the of the bubbles floating above McClelland's head, but it must have been pretty interesting.

Vice president of the bathroom

I am in the Baltimore airport.  I was just in the men’s rest room where I heard a voice projecting and echoing in the dingy ceramic-walled space. “Yeah, he’ll be the person interfacing with the customer on that...”  Huh?  The discussion was coming from somewhere in the stalls where, in a men’s bathroom, there’s typically only one thing happening, and that’s not a project management conference call.  Except this was evidently bathroom business and a call combined. 

One of the problems with holding a “call in the stall” is that there is a cacophony of other noises emanating from nearby stalls and urinals – including various plumbing and bodily sounds.  “I think he’s a vice president there,” he continued.  Peeing sounds.  Loud flush.  Come on man, where’s your sense of dignity?

There are other issues here too. When you go into the men’s bathroom, there are a few universally agreed-upon and unspoken rules that are always followed.  The most important (after the no-looking when you’re at the urinals rule) is no talking.  You don’t start conversations in there, even if you’re with someone.  You keep your comments to yourself – eyes straight ahead – wash your hands and leave.  Lingering too long to check your tie or hair or whatever is also not acceptable.  “I think that Sherry in Dallas is going to be doing that,” I hear after another flush.  I glance to my side and one of the other guys in there shakes his head imperceptibly.  We agree - he's a rule breaker. 

We can’t help but hear the manager try to manage from his stall.  "Those were supposed to be shipped from Atalnta last week..."

Another problem is that he is simply annoying everyone else. OK, me especially. I want to hang around and glare at him when he leaves the stall but I remember that there’s a California Tortilla Mexican restaurant right around the corner so he may be in there for a while.  Plus, hanging around makes me a rule breaker too.

Once back in the food court, I am still agitated and I am muttering to myself that I bet he didn’t wash his hands.  Then I hear a loud projecting voice: “Susan, we're going to need them shipped no later than the end of the week”.  I look up and see the bathroom talker sitting at the table next to me.  I glare at him.  Better late than never.