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| Saturday, July 1, 2006 |
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Branding as aversion 
Since you're not sending anything, remember I don't live here
| | ...it might be nice to formalize a ³fake² credit card billing address, authorized by the credit card company, that you can give when placing orders that will not be shipped to your physical address. |
Reports of PayPerPost's life may be slightly exaggerated
| | The Head Lemur adds, Pay Per Post will die a whimpering pathetic death. It is a stupid program. |
Late Pet du Jour
| | Yesterday we covered Pets 1 and 2. So, for no reason other than tech writing fatigue, I'll continue daily with a rundown of late pets until we run out in a few more days. |
| | Pet 3 was a short and stocky black and white mutt with brown dots over his eyes. His name was Kim, and my father got him from the pound as a gift for my sister and me. She was four and I was six. We had just moved into our new house, a few blocks from our old one in Maywood, New Jersey. The pound was called "Mister Kahn's", and it consisted of Mr. Kahn's basement, from which the sound of barking never ceased. We lived on Woodland Avenue. Mister Kahn lived on Washington, two streets away. This seemed a long way when I was six, but I see here it was all of about 300 feet, in a straight line, which was the route Kim took when he went back there, which was every chance he got. Kim loved to go back and visit his friends in the pound. |
| | The first time we met Kim, my father handed me the dog's leash and showed how I needed to wrap it around my wrist, so Kim wouldn't get away. Kim then dragged me, wrist-first, face in the grass, down the length of our back yard, in the general direction of Mr. Kahn's. |
| | My job was to take Kim for walks, or to retrieve him from Mr. Kahn's when he ran away. |
| | In the summer we lived in a home-made shack in South Jersey called The Wanigan, which sat near the center of a 1.5 acre lot near the edge of the pine barrens and about ten miles from the ocean. Pop and my uncle Archie built the place in 1949, the summer I turned two, not long after my sister was born. There was no Mr. Kahn's there, so when Kim escaped there was no telling where he headed. Since the ground was mostly sand I could sometimes follow his tracks a little way. But mostly I'd wander the woods and nearby streets calling his name. Once in awhile Kim would actually come when we called him. But mostly he was on the prowl for girl dogs. I didn't figure that out at the time, but that was the main scope of Kim's interest in life. |
| | Kim's life ended when he was hit by a car, not far from the Wanigan, about a year and a half after we got him. My cousin George (Archie's oldest) was riding his bike near my Grandma and Aunt Ethel's place (their property adjoined ours), when he saw Kim get hit. The dog wasn't killed outright, but mortally wounded. He ran part-way up a driveway before falling over dead. |
| | George got Pop, who broke the news to my sister and me. |
| | We buried Kim in a little clearing behind Grandma and Aunt Ethel's woodshed. To mark the plot, we bordered it with shells and covered it with moss we dug up from under some trees nearby. |
| | Losing Kim was my first experience with death. As losses go, it wasn't in the same league with losing some of our other pets or, eventually, family members. In death he seemed so strange to me, laying in a wheelbarrow, not breathing, completely still, with dust covering his wide-open eyes. Even though we laid him lovingly in the ground, it was hard to get past the shock and finality of it. Or the necessity of burial. He was one of us a strong living presence in our lives — even though he always longed to be elsewhere. And then he was gone. |
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