Uncle Tom was to walk at the head of the procession blowing his squealing horn, while Tuck came just back of the trumpet blower dragging the remains with a borrowed plow line. Next in line was Dan, crying like a woman on her 30th birthday, but keeping an ear cocked for the fine things we were all saying about what a great dog that Drum had been. Prof. Sam Jared, being better educated than the rest of us, walked at his side and gave both moral and physical support while the less talented of our members straggled along behind with handfuls of wild honey suckle that Joe Rollins had gathered as he came over Pilot Knob that morning. We were disputing among ourselves as to the advisability of letting Bro. Jeff Wall sing, but finally agreed that Drum had suffered sufficiently already and might not be dead enough to stand the strain, so we dropped him into a sink hole on Capshaw’s branch without further ado.
In the 1940s, my great-great-uncle Bob Lee Maddux wrote a series of letters to The Hunter’s Horn magazine about fox hunting and hunting dogs in and around Cookeville, Tenn., where he lived and where my dad’s whole family is from; in 1951 the magazine printed a collection of his columns and now I am reading them for the first time and they are beyond fantastic. This is a description of a “fancy funeral” held for one man’s dog who was shot by another hunter for running a sheep on his farm. It took me too long to read these things in the first place and now I might not ever get through the rest because I am just re-reading this perfect paragraph over and over and over.
Gawker | We Have Six New Amazing Paintings By George W. Bush This is the most compelling argument I’ve seen in quite some time for arts education in schools. Imagine all the trouble we would have avoided if Gee Dubs had realized earlier in life that his true calling was to paint! Or maybe all along he was just hustling like the rest of us.
Pop-upView Separately

Gawker | We Have Six New Amazing Paintings By George W. Bush

This is the most compelling argument I’ve seen in quite some time for arts education in schools. Imagine all the trouble we would have avoided if Gee Dubs had realized earlier in life that his true calling was to paint! Or maybe all along he was just hustling like the rest of us.

Last New Year’s Eve

Last New Year’s Eve, in the morning, Joe and I went out trying to find brunch; the first place we tried was closed, the second and third preposterously crowded, the fourth perfect. Then we stopped and bought a decent quantity of beer for the friends we were going to have over that night. On the way home, when we pulled onto our street, I saw all the cops parked up and down the block and was seized with panic; it was almost January and I, for whatever reason, hadn’t yet updated my license plate with the new registration sticker I’d been sent back in November. There were enough cops that I was sure one of them would notice and ticket me. Then I quickly realized that there were enough cops that I had no reason to be worried about my license plate but possibly plenty of reason to worry about something else.

I steered the car at a creep all the way down the street to our apartment, pulled down into the parking lot, and craned our necks up at the bigger apartment building across the way from ours, where the cops from the cars were all bustling, heads down, up and down the shared porch that ran across the front of the building’s second story. We parked and heaved our beer into our arms and wandered across the lot and up the driveway to the dumpsters, where a few of our neighbors stood, talking low and looking blankfaced.

Read More

Top