Posts by Hank

Confucius say: Dog who belongs to you will generally do what you say.  Dog who doesn’t, won’t. “Pickle, come,” I say. Pickle just stares at me.  I’m standing with the back door open.  Pickle is in the yard, 15 feet away, still as a statue.  Carol and I are watching him because Robby and Brianne bo…

I told you, in last month’s post, how the Beagle Man wound up with a Duck Toller.  Which got me to wondering:  How did you all choose your best dog in the world? ROB & CHARLOTTE: SCOUT (4 yrs old) “In 2018, Charlotte and I woke up one morning and decided to go to a rescue shelter we’d been eye…

I’m not even supposed to be thinking about another dog yet.  That’s what was in my head after Ricky, the World’s Most Handsome, Most Lovable, and Most Stubborn Beagle, passed away in April, 2014.  I’d always heard that when your dog dies, you’re so disconsolate that thoughts of the next dog are un…

He’s not a puppy anymore.  Although strangers he runs into on the street, or in the dog park, or on the beach still think he is, based on that eager expression of his, not to mention his hyper activity level. About a year ago, I thought I noticed that Kemba had slowed down just a tiny bit, and loo…

My friend Jeff started life as a cat person.  I well remember Twotone from our growing-up years, and then M’hija, from Jeff’s young-adulthood with his wife Joan, first in NYC, then Virginia.  It wasn’t until the year 2000 that Jeff got his first dog.  (I’m not counting Dog and Friend, the two he h…

Of all the unbendable rules governing weddings and marriage that millennials have inflicted on the world, and themselves, the one that intrigues me most is: get a dog before you get a baby.  (Sometimes, before you even get engaged.)  The thinking seems to be: Might be a good time to break in that a…

[Here, the second installment of my epic poem from 2016.  A related ode, “The Dogs of Sunville,” appeared last summer and celebrated Kemba’s life on the beach.  The rhythm and theme of all three follow Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat,” which is, more or less, the only poem I know.] &nbsp…

A close friend who’s from Ukraine forwarded to us this report — “Waiting for Death.”  Kemba, Ricky, and I thought all of our BEAGLE MAN followers should see it, too.  It was written last Sunday by a resident of Mariupol, Nadiya Sukhorukova, and translated by Laura Olla AZ Palmer: I go outside in be…

Nope, that beat-up ball in my Chuckit (photo, right) is not the one we had when we started out at the dog park. It is the one we ended up with, though. Here’s how it goes. I open the front door of the Jeep and Kemba barrels out as if his life depends on it, dashes to his spot on the dirt at the ed…

Note:  Other than the fact that my dog, Kemba, is named for Kemba Walker, and the somewhat peripheral mention of the UConn “Huskies,” this post has little or nothing to do with dogs.  Okay, nothing. “I hope the Knicks get destroyed tonight,” I said to Carol. That’s a verbatim quote — from a lifelon…