We celebrate the spirit of independence

My Door County Advocate column for July 2, 2014:

It was Patrick O’Donahue, that fiercely proud American who was also fiercely proud of his Irish heritage, who first drilled into me the name of the holiday we celebrate this Friday.

“The Fourth of July is just a date,” said Pat, the locquacious fellow who wrote so well for the Green Bay News-Chronicle. “This is Independence Day.”

There's only one way to discover anything

What's out there? You never know until you step off.

World peace begins with a giggle

We're all just too serious – too angry.

Stop that.

"I have never yet seen or heard anything serious that was not ridiculous," Horace Walpole said.

Find the silliness.

Learn to laugh at ourselves, and the anger goes away.

If you're not ready to laugh at yourself, find something that makes you laugh.

If you're not ready to laugh, find something that makes you smile.

If you're not ready to smile – well, find a way to get ready.

Our lives depend on it.

The accidental book cover

Willow and Dejah were wrestling, as dogs and puppies are wont to do, and I grabbed the camera to see if I could get them in action. For the most part, the session was a failure. They wouldn’t turn their faces toward me, and just as I clicked the photo they would move. Wrestling dogs don’t pause to pose.

When I looked at the dismal results of the session, however, one shot popped out at me – the puppy, caught in mid-snarl in a blur. It was not long after she’d had emergency surgery, and she still was wearing the cone that protected her stitches. Through the blur you could see her eyes, wide with the frustration of wanting to get to Willow through the cone.

I knew I would be writing a story about a man who makes the transition from one life to the next and becomes a puppy trying to solve his own murder. And an ebook cover was born.

Sometimes artwork is the result of painstaking planning and careful thought. Sometimes you get lucky.


The Puppy Cried ‘Murder’ is available now at an ebook distributor near you.

It's time I tried to say this

(My Door County Advocate column for June 11.)

It’s odd to have let eight years go by. My mother passed away on June 6, 2006, and with all of the writing I have done since then, I have never written about her death. Not directly, at least.

Hilda Elwell was born Dec. 14, 1923, youngest of three children. Her brother Henry Jr. was a ham radio enthusiast, interested in the new technology that was growing up with them.

One day she encountered one of her brother’s radio friends, a handsome, lanky young man her age named Dick Bluhm. They began to see each other; actually, she was a bit of a looker herself, and several young men were interested.

But, she would tell her three sons, one day she heard that you should marry someone you can’t live without. She thought about these young men who sought her and realized one by one that they were all people she could live without if she had to – all except one.

“I thought oh, if I had to live without Richard, I don’t think I could do that,” she told us. They were married Dec. 3, 1944, and moved the next year to California, where the Army transferred him in those waning days of the war.

Anyone asked to raise three sons is a saint. We were a handful, the three of us fussing and watching the world from the back seat of the 1954 Studebaker Commander. 

I remember someone who loved to laugh, who tried to be cheerful and optimistic in all things, countering angry or discouraging words with a chorus from “South Pacific”: “Happy talk, keep talking happy talk …” 

I remember peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with a generous additional dab of butter, and at Christmastime I remember magic bars, those marvelous treats layered with chocolate, coconut and condensed milk with a graham-cracker-crumb base.

Her mind began to fail her in later years. In every phone call to New Jersey, I would tell her we had seven cats, and she was amazed  and surprised every time. 

I remember once she responded to one of my comments with a sly remark like she used to, and it was my turn to be surprised. She was still in there after all, at least from time to time. It was comforting, but I mourned for the lady she was.

On the morning of June 5, 2006, she woke up and told my dad she had a terrible headache, and she stayed in bed for a while. When he came back to check on her a little while later, she wouldn’t wake up. 

I was called that night and asked to come right away. I drove through the night and all day, and the three of us gathered with Dad around the hospital bed. They took her off life support, and Dad held her hand.

She didn’t move the whole time. Only the monitors told us when she was gone. Her heart kept beating longer than I expected. I remember saying, “She always did have a good heart.”

Then I collapsed from exhaustion. That was damn embarrassing. After the doctors made sure I was OK, Dad and my younger brother and I went out for a pizza. Long her caregiver, Dad hadn’t left her side much that last day.

These words seem inadequate. Maybe that’s why I haven’t written about it for eight years: How do you properly explain my mom? How does anyone?

I had a good talk on the phone with my dad on Friday, June 6; we didn’t mention the reason I decided to call that particular day. Not directly, at least. 

Sunday afternoon I made magic bars. After they came out of the oven, I took a bite and thought, “Hi, Mom. Merry Christmas.”

Never give up

Dejah collapses in exhaustion on the floor, frustrated that she can't seem to find her big sister Willow anywhere.

The best way to start your morning

No day is wasted that begins snuggling with a golden retriever.

The inevitable tail of the delayed book

I should have known this would happen. I just should have known. Curse me for a worse than senseless fool.

"I will write the story," she said. "You just write the prologue and the epilogue, and I will do the rest. Everyone will love it! It will be a delightful change of pace, and you can take the month off and concentrate on future stories."

The idea was so tempting. I had been devoting all of my spare time to writing Myke Phoenix stories all year. What could possibly go wrong?

The time came for her to deliver her chapters so that we could get on with publishing the book.

"Where is the story, puppy?" I asked with an eager smile. She returned my eager smile with an eager smile. And she sat there panting like, well, like a dog.

The expression on her face was loving and happy and – and blank. Whatever spark of intelligence was there had been replaced by plain old dogness. Well, nothing is plain or old about this dog, but it became painfully clear that she was not going to deliver the goods as she promised.

All was not lost. Just the deadline. She left her partially completed manuscript, and she did tell me the whole sordid and unbelievable story. I should be able to piece it all together and recreate what she was going to create in a matter, if not days, of weeks, and you will be able to read the astonishing tail – err, tale – by the end of June. Just not June 2.

I can, at least, share the cover with you. Pretty cool, huh?

She is a nice dog. At least she's trying to be. It's hard to be a puppy, because there's so much to learn. And when you are distracted by bad dreams that turn out to be fading memories of your past life, a life that ended prematurely because you were murdered – well, being a puppy is that much more complicated.

Watch for the next installment in my Myke Phoenix dodecalogy when you least expect it, certainly sometime between now and the end of June. After all, I have another installment due in July ... and another in August ... and ... oh dear.

Be a gardener

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. 

“It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

The good, the bad and the puppy

She brought me my slippers. OK, she brought one of my slippers into the room and dropped it about 10 feet from where I was sitting. All right, a few minutes later she brought the other slipper and dropped it about 8 feet over in the other direction.

Close enough. At least she didn’t chew them to shreds. That’s progress.

Dejah, named after a Martian princess, has so far lived up to her name as some kind of alien beast. At 9 months, she is already the same size as her 5-year-old housemate, Willow, and twice the handful.

• The good: The summer season came so soon after the end of winter this year, it almost came as a surprise. It seemed like one week it was 35 degrees, and the next week the highways were filled with visitors. Oh wait, that’s exactly what happened.

Driving to our Southern Door home as the Memorial Day crowd drove north Friday, I noticed more bass boats than ever coming to town. The secret’s out, now that Bassmaster magazine has placed the area on top of its list of the 100 Best Bass Lakes.

• The bad: We spent the three-day weekend puttering around the yard, moving dirt, pulling weeds, and still didn’t get seeds in the garden. Most years by the first of June, it’s almost time to start consuming fresh radishes. That was one brutal winter.

• The puppy: The early and late winter meant from the age of 2 months to 8 months, cabin fever was a fact of life for this young and rambunctious thing. One guy at puppy class said he’ll never again bring a new dog into the house in the fall. Seconded!

• The good: What winter? At the beginning of the weekend some of the trees were still in no apparent hurry to grow leaves this year. As of Tuesday morning we have a canopy.

• The bad: We stay in Wisconsin because of the four seasons. Four! When it’s 35 degrees at the end of April and 80-something at the end of May, the old body hasn’t had time to adjust. I think I have a couple of toes that are still thawing out while my brain is overheating.

• The puppy: The fastest my heart raced this weekend was when I closed the garden gate and then let the dogs out to run in the yard. In my heat-induced stupor Monday afternoon, I forgot we have two gates to the back yard. Dejah was halfway to Illinois before I realized the other gate was open.

Fortunately, Red is one smart cookie. She sent Willow to chase after both of us. The big sister ran a circle around the younger one, who got into the game and chased her. The two of them were back in the house long before I limped breathlessly into the yard and closed the other gate.

• The good: Over the years they’ve made about 30 movies about the giant monster known in America as Godzilla. Only two of them qualify as anything more than guilty pleasures: the first one in 1954 (the original, not the U.S. mix with Raymond Burr) and the one that’s currently in the theaters. My, oh, my.

• The bad: Spurred by the Robert Redford Oscar nomination, we sat down to watch the one-man show “All is Lost” over the weekend. It’s a great performance if you enjoy watching a character you barely know slowly drown for two hours that you will never get back. The title gives away the ending.

• The good: We’ve reached that time of year where so much stuff is happening in Door County, there’s no need to turn on the TV anyway.

• The bad: How do you choose? How do you choose? There are so many wonderful choices!

• I turned around to see what Dejah was chewing while I wrote this column and found her surrounded by piles and piles of stuffing she had removed from a plush toy. Yep, it’s a puppy.

From the Door County Advocate, May 28, 2014