Pretzel, Houdini & Olive: Essays On the Dogs of My Life

Auteur

Deborah Thompson is a professor of English at Colorado State University, where she teaches literary criticism and creative nonfiction. A Pushcart Prize winner, she has published personal essays in journals including the Missouri Review, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Passages North, Briar Cliff, Upstreet, the Kenyon Review (online), McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and others. Contest wins include the Missouri Review’s 2008 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in creative nonfiction and the 2010 Iowa Review contest in the nonfiction category. She lives with her dogs in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Texte du rabat

A young widow and her five dogs confront life.

Résumé
A young widow and her five dogs confront life.

Échantillon de lecture

"Not petting dogs has always been agony for me, and I have indulged in every kind of human-canine flirtation to get a dog to accept my touch. However, after Rajiv died, the need to touch fur, if not human skin, became almost mammalian, instinctual as a drive. Touch maintains your boundaries; it reminds you that you have an outline, a definition. The raw need for a defining touch, now denied, surprised me amidst my grief. Nobody, not even the grief support counselors, could have prepared me for this body hunger, the animal part of loss. Nobody warned me about the heavy emptiness of a chest no longer pressed, about the craving of skin suddenly deprived of touch, a dissolution that consumes the body like leprosy. It’s not lust, exactly, or desire, or even longing; it’s the way skin cries. Nobody talks about it, but widows know. Dogs know too. It’s what makes suburban dogs leap onto chests and laps against all training. It’s why street dogs might, in time, forego their instinct for survival to bow their heads into a human palm.” –from “Among the Street Dogs of Kolkata”

“Because dogs scavenged corpses along with other refuse, they have been associated with death in many cultural traditions, or sometimes serve as intermediaries between life and death (or afterlife). In the Hindu tradition of Rajiv’s upbringing, two four-eyed dogs help Yama, the God of Death, guard the gates of the otherworld. In Greek mythology, Cerberus, a three-headed dog, stood guard at the gates of Hades where he let souls in but not out. The ancient Egyptians worshipped Anubis, the jackal-god and guide into the Afterlife, and the Aztecs had Xolotl, a sometimes monstrous dog of the Underworld. If it’s true that myths are a culture’s dreams, and that, like dreams, they both reveal and conceal repressed truths, then these mythic dogs point to a recognition that human-dog relations exceed the natural realm. Rather, they venture into the supernatural, the nebulous realm of instinct and intuition that some people call the spiritual world. In the human imagination, dogs sit at that liminal space between human civilization, such as it is, and the natural world to which we all return. Dogs show us the way to a world beyond our knowing.” –from “Scavenger Love”