Down Boy!

Fight or flight—it’s a strange situation.

We were out for our neighborhood walk the other night. Approaching from the other direction, a couple with two dogs straining at their leashes. One was a small yappy mutt, the other a big, hulking mass of muscle. Probably a pit bull. We idle a bit, waiting for them to go around us. Both dogs are barking. Suddenly, the pit bull’s leash snaps—the end in the guy’s hand whips back and hits him in the face, stunning him momentarily.

We’re about 50 yards away. This grey-mottled dog, a fifty or sixty pounder, makes a beeline for us. Full gallop, barking and looking decidedly unfriendly. My wife creeps around behind me; I decide to stand my ground. As the dog gets close, I do the only thing I can think to do: I say, in a stern authoritative voice, “Down, boy.” I don’t know what I was thinking, that this dog was suddenly going to turn into valedictorian from his obedience school and understand what I was saying to him. The dog keeps coming, hellbent for leather, as they say, zooms past us, circles around, comes back again, passes again, gets halfway toward its owners, turns and comes back again. “Down boy,” I repeat. Heck, it worked the first time. The dog circles us again and this time goes all the way back to its owners. Crisis averted. Just a vignette from an ordinary life, but if that dog had decided I looked yummy enough, I’d’ve been his lunch, no question.

A productive weekend. I got a couple of projects for Hellnotes out of the way, finished the first draft of the short story I mentioned last time, and revised three chapters from Missing Persons. Only 100 pages left to go, pending revision requests from my agent on chapters 10-23.

We rented Empire Falls, a two-part HBO miniseries based on the Richard Russo novel. Stars Ed Harris, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward among others. Woodward is the matriarch of a family that wields all the influence in a small Maine town. Harris is trapped running her grill. Also stars Helen Hunt as Harris’ ex-wife, Dennis Farina as her new beau and Robin Penn Wright as Harris’ mother in flashbacks. Very well done all around. Paul Newman, who plays Ed Harris’ father, looks like he was having a blast playing an unrepentant scallywag. Beware if you rent it that the two parts come in separate DVD cases and are separate rentals, at least at Blockbuster.

I finished Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, a thoughtful consideration of how society can come to accept some abhorrent changes in direction. I’m finally getting around to reading Transgressions, edited by Ed McBain. The opening story is Donald Westlake, a good, solid Dortmunder caper. The next is Anne Perry, who I’ve never read before. She typically does historical mystery but this one is contemporary, set in Northern Ireland and involves a staunch leader of the Protestant faction and his family held hostage by three IRA members while on vacation. She puts some interesting spins on the word “hostage.”

Currently on The Corn Maiden: A Love Story by Joyce Carol Oates. It’s a very different style, very Oates-ish, which is literary, abstract and experimental. Three young rich girls kidnap a schoolmate who isn’t well off and keep her in the basement of one of the mansions to perform an old Indian ritual on her. Meanwhile the single mother is being lambasted by the media and the girls have planted evidence to implicate a disliked part time teacher.

Tropical Storm Vince, my namesake, is “a strange one,” they say. Formed in a part of the eastern Atlantic generally considered too cold for tropical storm formation. Only one letter in the alphabet left for the 2005 hurricane season before they have to resort to Greek letter names.