They just keep coming: dogs in poetry, dogs in conversation, dogs in death, dogs in life, dogs in rock and roll, dogs in jurisprudence, dogs and more dogs.

I know I have the book now, if it continues to rain dogs like this. It was the never the book I thought I would write about what has happened to me, but that means it is the right book.

Let it rain:

In James Tate’s poem, “Dream On,” he writes: The family dog howls all night,/ lonely and starving for more poetry in his life.

A snarling and starving dog chained perpetually to a stake certainly needs more poetry in his life, and the poetry begins when he mauls his owner to death and I write some doggerel about it.

The great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.” Americans generally don’t. Most Americans also can’t distinguish between being trampled on and the obvious outcome of their elections.

In the course of my father’s career as a minister, he performed over a hundred funerals and graveside services for humans, including some where drunken humans got into fistfights and fell into graves. He also performed exactly one for a dog. It was called a “celebration of association” for a basset hound named Little Slugger and my father helped bury the dog after the service.

One of the very few worthwhile uses of social media is informing others of the loss of a dog (or other family pet). The writing on grief in these posts is often extraordinary and typically much better than when a human writes about the loss of a human.

In concert, Captain Beefheart would often recite to his audiences, “You can tell by the kindness of a dog how a human should be.” This statement often ended up on the lyric sheets of his albums but was never part of song.

I know a friend who as a child gave up Catholicism on the spot when her priest told her dogs don’t go to heaven. He then mocked her love of dogs.

In 1989 Spy magazine published perhaps the greatest unconventional essay about dogs, “No Wonder They Call Me a Bitch,” by a food writer named Ann Hodgman. In the essay, Hodgman eats various brands of wet and dry dog foods in the presence of her dog and reports on their culinary qualities. I used to teach the essay to my students and eat dog food in their presence while we discussed it.

I have a friend who once lived in Finland and told me dogs (and other pets) were covered by their national health insurance. That says all you need to know about the sweet scourge of socialism and how other countries treat their dogs better than America treats their indigent sick humans.

My favorite stories of natural disasters are about those people in the disaster zones who refuse to leave if they can’t bring their dogs with them.

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