Chet Baker: Now We Are Ten

From The not Writer's Almanac: Today is the birthday of Chet Baker, Boston Terrier,  born December 12, 2004, in Stewartstown, Pennsylvania, by Peanut Brittle out of Miss Chili Bean. Grandparents: Handsome Boy and Maeve Bean.

Newborn Bacon with fresh bellybutton photo courtesy Jane Streett, Pups Will Travel 

Baker is a poet, musician, entertainer, chipmunk exterminator and writer, but he is known best as a muse to the writer Julie Zickefoose, who toils in relative obscurity except for the blogposts she writes about her canine companion.

photo by Bill Thompson III

From an early age, Baker loved the camera, and as a small puppy, upon hearing the Schwingg! Zickefoose's first camera, a small Olympus point and shoot, made when it was turned on, he trotted over and posed, ready to make Internet history.

and yes I am fully aware of the double entendres in that sentence

Chet Baker has two siblings, Liam

and Phoebe

and a doting Daddeh

all of whom he loves very much

but he will not leave the yard without Mether.

photo by Bill Thompson III

Of their relationship, Baker wrote, "It is good for a dog of my caliber to have a reasonably literate person with nimble fingers, whom he may enlist to type his thoughts for him. Our kind has been held back by our clumsy and inflexible paws, and it is only when one finds a meet scribe that the world may truly know what goes on in the mind of a Boston terrier, or any other dog, for that matter."

I burdied something. I am not saying what it was, but it may have been lima beans.

Chet Baker keeps fit and active by running regularly

and posing for many dozens of photographs each and every day. He writes,

"When all is said and done I will probably be the most-photographed dog in history, or at least in Ohio. What Mether will do with all these photos, only Heaven knows. Perhaps there will be a Chet Baker Museum in my future. Or at least a book about me. People would like that."

 Once she finishes her next bird book, Zickefoose will follow the plan her dog has set out for her and resume work on a book about Chet Baker's life. She writes, "It's interesting to write someone else's memoir, to go through his life and pick out the high points and the low points, and to realize that his life is really yours, too. That's how close we are. He is my constant companion, my familiar, my muse, and I don't want to imagine a world without him. So I'd better get cracking and describe this one the best I can. Because there never was a dog like Chet Baker."

Happy birthday, my beloved Chet Baker. You just get better and better. 

Let's write some more chapters, shall we?

 Connecting to the spirits at Waxler Church, December 7, 2014