Bulldog vs. Terrier: The Perfect Mix

As Baby Birds comes to its fruition, I'm happy to say that I'm well along on a book about Chet Baker. It doesn't yet have a home in a publishing house, but that's not a big concern to me right now. What I want, and what I've accomplished, is to have a bunch of chapters written and its voice firmly established when Baby Birds hits, so you can tell exactly what it will be and what it won't be. And we'll take it from there. The time to shop a new manuscript is when your new book hits. With your help, I'm looking forward to Baby Birds hitting hard!

The Chetbook is not going to be another "Your dog is actually a wolf and here's why" book. Lord knows that's been done, and done, and done again. It's not going to be all sciencey.  Well, it will have the amount of science that my everyday life does, which is a good dash, the sriracha sauce that spices every pursuit. 

It's not going to go on and on about training, but it will, I hope, give you a picture of how one person molded a near-perfect companion from a little blob of black putty. 

Mostly what it will be is me, telling you who this dog is, what he does and what he means to me, every day. There is adventure, reflection, reverie and the helpless laughter that Boston terriers so expertly draw from their people. The Bacon keeps giving me stories, another huge one last night, right after this video was shot. I'm saving that one for the book. I put a lot of good stuff on the blog, but I can't write the way I can in a book; I can't delve as deep. The Chetbook seems like one without an end, because his story is changing and deepening as we go. It's my story, too. Eleven years is a long time to love someone this much. I hope we have a good handful more. 

Enjoy the video of Baker being hisself. Enough bulldog in him to give up the chase and come along, and enough terrier to run ahead.

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

The Chet Baker Book

Chet and me, fall 2005. We're both pretty smooth. That was then.

Photo by Bill Thompson III

Not long after we got Chet Baker in February, 2005, I looked at him and said, “Little dog, you are going to pay off our mortgage.” I knew at the time that this was an outrageous statement, dripping with hubris. And that it was almost certainly untrue. But it seemed an apt way to express my admiration for the small black and white bundle who was turning out to be a remarkable dog.

I’m well into the writing of Chet Baker’s story. It’s what I do for fun. The chapters scroll out like those Chinese paper yoyo's on a stick, snapping out to great lengths then rolling back up into a tidy cylinder. I love to write about Chet when he’s lying beside me breathing softly, or when my bare foot is running over his flank as he lies at my feet. That’s the thing, isn’t it? I have to write this while he’s here, have to get the book out while he’s still hale and hearty. I couldn’t write it with an open happy heart if he weren’t. And all of us who love dogs know that their span on the planet is cursedly brief. That’s the one thing we haven’t gotten right in all this selective breeding. You can breed a dog with a nine-inch muzzle or none at all. You can get  squinty almond eyes or googly pop eyes; you can get foot-long hair or wrinkly bare skin. But you can’t do much with that lifespan. Why is that? Must it be an immutable characteristic of dogs to delight us for a dozen years, make themselves indispensible, work their way into every corner of our hearts, then leave?

He’ll be eight in December. I started blogging in December 2005 when he was a slick skinny year old pup. It stuns me to think that I’ve been blogging for seven years, almost as long as Chet's been in our lives. I know I haven’t done nearly enough Chetposts to suit either you or me, but there are always stories and pictures I hold back—the best ones. The blog is all well and good, free to all for the consuming, but it's books that are my real product, books that keep the house lit and the refrigerator stocked, that keep gas in our cars. Well, books and speaking honoraria. 

Bill came out of the studio a couple of years ago after messing around on my computer and announced that Chet now had his own Chet Baker, Boston Terrier Facebook page, and it was up to me to maintain it. It was surprising. Making a Facebook page for our dog had never occurred to me, but Bill is smart about things like that.  I took to channeling Chet's thoughts like a wood duck takes to sycamores. Now the durn dog’s got 1,050 friends, about ten more each week. It's adding up, broadening his audience, spreading by word of mouth. It's good.

 Writing updates for Chet has helped me get inside his head, develop his own voice, think what he’s thinking and say what I think he’d say if he could speak in words. He speaks to me with his eyes, his ears, his posture, his breathing, with the angle of his tail and the set of his increasingly floppy jowls. He speaks in pictures; I put them into words. On his Facebook page, people talk to Chet like they would talk to their own beloved pet; they seem to forget that there’s a person in between, and that’s fine with me. That means the canine medium thing is rolling.

Newly minted eight month old Baker, still fitting into a 2T shirt. Halloween 2005.

It may seem like fun and games, but I take it all seriously, the sharing and building connections with people who get what’s cool about Chet Baker and the dog-human bond. I'm excited to put how I feel about Chet, all the things he has taught me, into a book. I feel lucky to be able to get books published at all, much less so beautifully, in full color between hard covers. I still like books. I don’t want to read on some kind of device. I want to turn pages, to stick a Kleenex in them to mark my place and fall asleep to the thunk of the real live book hitting the floor. Let me know if you need some personalized, signed copies of The Bluebird Effect and Letters from Eden for Christmas presents. Order forms on the right sidebar. 

I’d written 14,000 words about Chet Baker before I was ready to send a proposal to my agent. He digs  it, but then he's soft on dogs. It occurs to me that there are probably a lot more people who are into dogs than are into wild birds. We’ll see where it goes from here. If people love this book like I love this dog, it’d pay off the mortgage and buy a new tractor too. Hey, I can dream. If I didn't dream I wouldn't be writing books.

He’s licking his pawdypads again. That’s how he brushes his teef and sets his thoughts in order. I write. We all have our ways.  

photo by Bill Thompson III

Chet and me, seven years down the road. A few more angles, a little more gray, and many more miles traveled together. We're old friends. We understand each other. It's time to put that into a book.

I'll let you know when I know when the book's coming out. All I know now is that it has to come out. The Bacon wants to sign books!

To all those Internet Explorer users who've had problems loading the blog this past week: so sorry. My wonderful Web Witch has figured out that Blogger inserted some junk html code when I tried to update my "Julie in the Flesh" section last week. Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome simply ignored it, but IE gagged on it. She's cleaned it all up and it's up and running on all browsers again. Let the Chetfix continue!