But He's Not My Dog: And Other Tales

By Sara Bloom

When carefully chosen and set down in the proper order, words have the power to convey ideas and information, and to encourage, support, motivate, excite and amuse. In this collection of essays, Sara Bloom demonstrates mastery over all of those components. From a lovingly conceived essay about her father, to her hot fudge sundae secret to weight loss, and the laugh-out-loud escapades of life in the suburbs with husband, children, job, and animals domestic and wild, Sara Bloom shares her observations, her wit, and her individual view of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 10, 2008
• ISBN: 9781462807086

Sara Bloom

For 21 years, Sara Bloom was the Feature Editor and Special Sections Editor of The Scarsdale Inquirer, the weekly newspaper in Scarsdale, NY. During her tenure, the New York Press Association cited her 27 times, including four first-place awards, for editorial and design excellence. Currently, she is president of Blazer Books, Inc., the family publishing and public relations firm. She also teaches a memoir-writing workshop for the Southold Adult Education Program. Sara Bloom is a graduate of Arcadia University. She and her husband, Bruce, live in Southold, NY. They have two daughters and two granddaughters.

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Copyright © 2009 by Sara Bloom.

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Contents

RAMBLES

BUT HE’S NOT MY DOG

BEACH SCENE

THE TROUBLE WITH MAGGIE

THROUGH A FISHEYE LENS

THE HAT

THE PAINTERS ARE COMING! THE PAINTERS ARE COMING!

THE KING’S ENGLISH

LIFE’S LESSONS AND LEMONADE

NOT PEGGY FLEMING

LIVER (GULP) FOR DINNER

A PRESENT FOR CHARLES

GROWTH FACTOR

RAVES

A SAD SAGA OF SINFUL SLOTH

SARA’S HOT FUDGE SUNDAE DIET

TAFFY WAS A CLASS ACT

GRADUATION: THE VIEW FROM THE BLEACHERS

A LETTER TO SANTA CLAUS

THE ART OF THE SACRED PAUSE

WHEN MAN AND NATURE MEET

FOR A CHEAP THRILL, TRY INLINE SKATING

WHEN WORDS FAIL, MAKE A STATEMENT

TANGEE-BLE ASSET

HOMAGE TO CHARLIE

MARKETING WITH MURDICH YIELDS TOOTHSOME TIPS

RANTS

DEAR JOHN

NOBODY STEALS BOOKS

THE HEART OF THE MATTER

UTOPIA REVISITED

A THANKSGIVING POSTMORTEM

CONFESSIONS OF A YESTERDAY’S WOMAN

A SNIFF, A WHIFF, AND THE ORANGE PUSSYCAT

NAMES IN THE NEWS

For Bruce

and our family

INTRODUCTION

HOW MANY PIECES have you written for this class? Lydia Fakundiny asked me at our student-teacher conference. The class is a one-week workshop in essay writing held each summer as part of the Cornell Adult University program on the Cornell campus in Ithaca, NY. Lydia Fakundiny is the favored instructor for the essay-writing class, and for five summers, I have been one of her many appreciative students. My response to her question was, Oh, I think maybe eight or 10."

You should put them together in a book, she said.

Although I had been suggesting a gathering of creative work to my own students in the memoir-writing workshop I lead for the Southold Adult Education Program, I had failed, shoemakers’ children-like, to heed my own advice. I have been offering the workshop for the town’s program for eight terms, and those students who have been with me since the beginning have assembled a considerable body of work, touching on memorable moments in their lives and written largely for present and future generations of their families.

Collect them in a notebook, I counsel. Your children and grandchildren will cherish this written inheritance, I assure them.

But my own book? Somehow, I hadn’t envisioned it.

Although once Ms. Fakundiny had introduced the idea, I must confess succumbing to flattery and, more, looking to swell the offerings. I began tearing through the house – scouring files, desk drawers, closet shelves, and basement storage boxes for first-person pieces that might be included, with the Cornell work, in this book of Sara.

The result is this collection of essays produced largely during my writing career as an editor of The Scarsdale Inquirer, and as a student in Cornell’s summer program. I thank The Inquirer and its sister papers, The Enterprise and the Record-Review, for allowing me to step out of the objective role of good journalism from time to time and to delve happily into subjective text. I hope you will be amused and, in some instances, gently challenged by these ponderings.

I thank my family for serving – not always eagerly – as subjects for my musings, and acknowledge our various pets for their distractions and entertainments, which supplied comic subject matter. I also thank Lydia Fakundiny, who originally suggested this exercise. I owe much to her analytical expertise and encouragement. I am indebted to David Kirkwood, for many years the editor of The Scarsdale Inquirer and currently editor of The Hearing Journal. As a contributor to both publications, I have been submitting written work to David Kirkwood for nearly 35 years, and it is his skills as an editor that have helped me shape my work and develop as a writer.

But more than any other influence on my writing is a simple, three-word comment penned by an English department instructor early in my freshman year at college. Whenever I am asked to talk to young people about careers in writing or about newspaper work, and at the first session for new students in my memoir-writing workshop, I invoke the name of Mary Sturgeon. I tell listeners about my early foray into the writing life when, believing that the bigger the words summoned into play, the more impressive the text, I would curl up happily with a fat dictionary to hone my craft. For my first assignment in Mrs. Sturgeon’s English composition class, I called up an astonishing array of polysyllabic words amassed in my 17 years and applied them to a lofty treatise on what I expected to gain from my college experience. I was certain my paper would bowl over the instructor with its erudition. It didn’t. Mrs. Sturgeon graded the paper with a D and wrote, Wordiness blurs image.

In my essay, The King’s English, included in this collection, I recount this experience and add, I spent the rest of that year and the more than five decades that have followed working toward clear and precise writing, largely by choosing the simpler word and rejecting the puffery of my youth.

I hope I have succeeded.

Sara Bloom

Fall 2008

Some of the essays in this collection have been published previously in The Scarsdale Inquirer, The Enterprise, The Record-Review, The Peppertree Literary Magazine, and Write From Your Heart, a collection of essays and poetry, and are reprinted with permission.

RAMBLES

BUT HE’S NOT MY DOG

I’VE NEVER OWNED a dog. There’ve been a dozen or so cats, lots of goldfish and guppies, and a parakeet. We’ve looked after the children’s classroom gerbils and guinea pigs over holiday vacations, and rushed to the pet store for rabbit food when the teacher forgot to reorder pellets. Probably because I once joined the Friends of the New York Zoological Society, I get mail from the ASPCA, Greenpeace, the Center for Environmental Education, the National Wildlife Federation, the Natural History Museum, and Whale Gifts, and I’m on every organization’s save-this-endangered-species list. I’m a true animal lover, but I never had a dog.

It’s not that I don’t like dogs. In fact, for years now, I’ve been threatening to acquire one. When I retire, I tell my husband. Dogs, as companionable as they are, require care and time.

So when this big black dog started to tag along with me while I was out on my exercise walk the other morning, I wasn’t terribly concerned. I wasn’t crazy about it, I mean he was pretty big, and I had no idea where he had come from, or what breed of dog he was, or whether he might have been thinking about taking a bite out of my leg. But he was wearing a collar, so obviously somebody loved him. He seemed truly to be enjoying his free run of the neighborhood, and he wasn’t looking menacingly at my leg or any other part of my body, so I just ignored him and went about my business. I figured that pretty soon he would turn back and head for home.

But he didn’t. He loped along with me, darting up ahead every so often to sniff at the shrubbery and the tires of parked cars. Lots of walkers and joggers were out, and Black Dog checked out all of them, weaving back and forth across Brewster Road as each one approached. Just when I had decided he’d grown tired of me, back he’d come.

Why me? Who knows? Supposedly, animals know intuitively who the animal people are, but with all the choices he had among the weekend athletes pounding the route, I can’t truly explain his attraction to me.

He had been with me – on and off – for more than a mile and, in fact, I had begun to take a liking to him. I think it had to do with his loyalty. But on the approach to Fenimore Road, Black Dog arrived first and promptly took off after a jogger headed east toward Post Road. Well, that’s the end of him, I thought. He’s somebody else’s companion now. I crossed Fenimore and continued north on Brewster Road.

Why was I still thinking about that dog? Why should I care where he lives or how far from home he had strayed, and why should it matter to me whether or not he finds his way home again?

Not far into Greenacres, I sneaked a peek behind me – apparently at the same time that Black Dog realized that I hadn’t made the right turn onto Fenimore Road. He blasted across both lanes of traffic and made a beeline for me. I never said a word to him, didn’t pet him or scratch him behind the ears. I just kept walking along. And he did, too. I think I was smiling.

There was no doubt in my mind now that he would stay with me for the whole route. No jogger, playful child, enticing car tire, trashcan, bush or berry patch was going to lure him from my side. I started planning how I would examine his tags when we got to my house, and how I would call his owners and sit with him on the front step until they came around to get him. I would take care of him, see that nothing happened to him while he was in my charge. He’d be safe with me.

On Sage Terrace, a car pulled up next to me, and the driver rolled down his window and called out, Shouldn’t you have that dog on a leash?

He’s not my dog, I said. If you feel strongly about a violation of the leash law, you should put him in your car and take him to the police station.

I knew he wouldn’t do that. Who’d put a big, strange dog like that in his car? He told me he’d call the police when he got home. Big brave driver, I thought. Whatever you think best, I said. He rolled up his window and moved off.

Black Dog and I continued on, passing Huntingdon and Kingston Roads and traveling all the way north to Farley Road. He waited for me there, probably remembering how he’d nearly lost me at Fenimore Road. When I made a U-turn and headed back south on Brewster, Black Dog did, too.

Near Gorham Court, I saw the police car coming toward us. The driver had made good on his promise. We got a call about a stray dog, the cop said. I’ll take him to headquarters, and we’ll get in touch with his owners.

The officer opened up the back door of the patrol car, but Black Dog wouldn’t go. He planted himself at my feet, dug