A woman from our past has
recently been in touch. We remember her and her family fondly, for many
reasons, including the tiny black poodle puppy her children named Moose. We
moved away and lost touch with them shortly after they acquired Moose. As we
caught up after not seeing each other for years, I asked about Moose.
“Moose was a disaster,” she
said, and she told the story.
Moose bit everybody, tore up
everything, peed on everything, would not cooperate in any way.
“We just had to get rid of him.
But we had paid a ton of money, so we wanted to sell him. He was registered and
all that. But we are honest people, so we knew we’d have to tell the truth, and
so we were going to lose a lot of money. Only one woman answered our ad. When I
took Moose over and saw how nice her house was, I knew this would be tragic. I
told her at the door she shouldn’t let us in, but she invited us in, anyway.
Moose immediately ran over to her nice sofa and peed on it. But she said, Let
me keep him for a weekend and we’ll see. Somehow it worked out. She bought him.
They got along great.”
“Why do you think it worked out
for her when he was such a disaster for you?” I asked.
“She changed his name to Pierre
and they moved to California.”
In writing a story, as in life,
a character just does not cooperate unless s/he has the right name and the
right setting.
John Robert McFarland
Daughter Katie Kennedy’s Learning to Swear in America will be
published by J. K. Rowling’s publisher, Bloomsbury Press, in 2016.
My novel, VETS, will be published by Black Opal Books in early 2015.
I tweet as yooper1721.
I also write Christ in Winter: Reflections on Faith from
a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter. http://christinwinter.blogspot.com/
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