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

by Deborah Thompson

Overview

Told from the perspective of a self-identified “crazy dog lady,” these eleven interconnected essays follow one woman’s relations with five different dogs. Together, they travel over terrain spanning her husband’s battle with cancer, his death, her grieving process, and her rejoining the living as her dogs lead her forward from the other end of their leashes. Alongside her personal story, she considers such cultural issues as Americans’ unhealthy relationships with the natural world, ageism across species, poverty and privilege, hoarding, and the meaning of happiness. This is not a sentimental “who-rescued-whom?” book about the healing power of animals. Instead, it explores one representative human’s relationships with dogs, with all their joys but also their frustrations, neuroses, and downright craziness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597098564
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	09/15/2020
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

"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”

Table of Contents

1 Let Dog 9

2 What's the Matter with Cocker Spaniels 16

3 Among the Street Dogs of Kolkata 34

4 Border Kali 56

5 Old Dogs' Tricks 72

6 Scavenger Love 80

7 Canine Cardiology 95

8 Rescue Dogs 111

9 Secondhand Happiness 120

10 The Spot 126

Editorial Reviews

"In an intoxicating mix of myth and story, natural history, science, and memoir, Thompson cooks up a masterful exploration of the human bond with dogs. Rolling in the wake of unspeakable grief after the loss of her partner to cancer, she turns to one of the other constants in her life—the love of a good dog or a dumb dog or, really, almost any dog because the operative word there is 'love,' that unconditional wet-nosed bodily kind of love that sustains us and gets Thompson out of bed every morning, the love that keeps her mind moving and keeps her alive as she writes her way out of the deep holes left by loss. Required reading for anyone who has lost someone and loved a dog—which is nearly everyone." —Steven Church, author of I’m Just Getting to the Disturbing Part: On Work, Fear, and Fatherhood

"Woven through these evocative memoir essays are the dogs of grief and joy—and of Kolkata. Street dogs and spirit dogs. Rescue dogs that we hope might rescue us. Dogs of myth and history. Daily dogs whose fur we can touch. After the loss of her partner, Rajiv, Debby Thompson found herself unprepared for what she calls 'the animal part of loss,' the way 'skin cries' for contact. In these stories—gritty, visionary, and heartbreaking—are the dogs of this world, the dogs of life, the dogs of now and of now-let’s-go!" —Veronica Patterson, author of Sudden White Fan

"Deborah Thompson’s collection of dog stories leaps past the honed edge of the twenty-first-century self-absorbency to bring home the experience of simply existing in a warm, earthbound, sense-luscious, skin-wrapped body. Thompson appeases the grief of losing a husband to cancer with tending to the simple physical needs of her dogs. Walking, peeing, shitting, sniffing, humping, licking . . . her experiences with her dogs filter out the lumpy complications and sharpen the 'now' of existing with loss. Yet this collection of stories doesn’t trivialize existence with a pat on the furry head of canine cuteness. The author doesn’t explain how humans and dogs do what they do or why they do so. Instead, she winds us through the dark alleys of her life with those warm, unquestioning companions at her side. These stories do not glide along the surface of complications that grease the surface of our lives. They do not complain and they do not explain. Rather, they show how the hard edges of life can be softened by warmth, loyalty, and a good dog." —Florencia Ramirez, author of Eat Less Water

From the Publisher