Sunday, March 19, 2006


Things in common.
I am just finishing the biography Never Have Your Dog Stuffed and other Things I've Learned by Alan Alda. As with many of the things I read, I heard about it on NPR. I discovered Alan and I have many things in common. We are about the same age. We both experienced an illness around the age of 7 which kept us confined for a considerable length of time. He thinks it made him a little strange. Maybe that is my problem - and never realized it. We both have three daughters. Our other communality is about burying a dog. His dog helped him get through polio, and then died shortly after. He and his father were going to bury the dog, but could not bring themselves to do it. So his father had it stuffed. The result was that it did not look anything like the dog, and ended up scaring people. The moral of the story is sometimes it is time to let something go, and keep the memory in your head. When our old faithful dog Herman died, my mother and I decided to bury him in the back yard. We actually would have, but neither of us had the strength to dig the hole deep enough, so we just buried Herman's blanket and collar. ( I don't remember what we did with Herman.) So there you go, several of the things that movie star Alan Alda and I have in common.

2 comments:

kwpershey said...

How interesting, Mama. Amd I think you could probably add "politics" to the list of things you have in common with Mr. Alda... :-)

Marie said...

what a funny story-where is the story about Karla? are you ready to tell that one??????