WriPaMeNo, Day 29: It’s a Dog’s Life (Too)

Poor starving puppyWelcome to day 29 of the Write Part of My Memoir in November challenge, poor puppy edition. 

Earlier today, I found myself filled with terror, followed by great pain. Stay with me here. The ordeal was over far more quickly than the telling will be.

A dog of many beds

It all started when I went into my bedroom to take an afternoon nap and quickly dozed off. I’m not generally a napper but, in the spirit of the Thanksgiving weekend, I had a beer with lunch.

Suddenly, I woke with a start to hear loud, insistent knocking from another room. It was like something out of a horror movie: “It’s coming from inside the house.”

Then I remembered.

My dog Madeleine snoozes in as many places as possible around the house on any given day, moving quietly from one perch to the next. It’s a skill and a vocation. I can’t always keep track of her whereabouts.

Sometimes she goes  into the guest room, which is adjacent to my office, and nestles on the bed. My house was built in the 1940s. The guest room is part of a 1970s addition that doesn’t share the central heating system installed in the original structure; I always close the door after Madeleine so as not to dissipate the heat. When I am working in the next room, I hear the rustling and scratching that lets me know she wants back in, but today when I went off to take a nap, I forgot that she was confined to a 250-square-foot space with en suite bath, pobrecito.

Thus the desperate knocking.

In my half-awake state and eagerness to rescue my dog in distress, I stubbed my toe against a chair near my bed. Many bad words were said, though they won’t be repeated here; see To Curse or Not to Curse.

How this shaggy dog story relates to my memoir

It was my first dog, Frankie, who turned my life upside down during the period covered by Getting Naked for Money; he is behind the book’s happy “girl-meets-dog” ending.

I know it’s going to be a struggle to strike just the right tone for the finish. I want to get across that living on my own was a choice, not a settling for less, that sharing my life with a pet is not a compensation for anything, but its own pleasure.

Read the story and look at that little face in the picture. Tell me I lie.

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About the Author

Edie Jarolim is a writer and editor living in Tucson, Arizona. Sign up on this blog to get updates about her humorous tell-all/memoir, GETTING NAKED FOR MONEY: An Accidental Travel Writer Reveals All.

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