A Dog Named Van Gogh

It is not often that I recall the moment that inspired a great idea. After all, it is generally over forty years of inspiration that has been collecting in my brain: bad romances, good food, sunlight on a lake on the last day of summer break -- all those emotions that make me and go into everything I write. Yet yesterday I saw an emotional thread that everything I have been trying to say -- those beads of feelings -- can hang on for the book I am writing called Stay:

In a very busy coffee shop sat an elderly man all alone. Around him was a whirlwind of much younger people in a mad rush with their lives. I suddenly felt such sympathy for that elderly man by himself and looking so fragile. What was his life like? Did he have anyone to go home to? What did he think of the world rushing around him? I had made an odd connection to him and my childhood pet, a dog named Lightning.

Lightning was my best friend -- well, often my only friend. She was a huge collie, so sweet and gentle. I lived a half a mile from the bus stop down a country lane. Lightning would walk with me rain, shine or snow down the old gravel road and would be waiting from me when I got back from school.

I would tell her all the important events of my world. The tragic bean sprout shame -- it didn’t grow in the milk carton farm, my finger painting mishaps -- yeah, I would spill my guts as we walked up that country road. Even if it was a wind chill of thirty below, she would hang on my every word. She would follow me over snowdrift after snowdrift as we weaved from side to side to look at that cardinal in that pine tree or that funny shape on the other side of the road It was a dragon -- if you turned your head just so -- and in need of slaying or at least a good barking at. Lighting was the warmest spirit that any child could want.

My brother would come home and see the crazy twisted trail of our foot prints in the snow and wonder aloud if I was drunk. Well, no one got me as a kid. No one but Lightning.

When I was in junior high we moved from a huge idyllic house in the country to a tiny place in the city. Lightning couldn’t come. She was too big, too old and had arthritis anyway. We’d be doing her a favor by putting her to sleep. I was a good kid, I didn’t complain. One day they just took her away, we moved the next day. I haven't thought about it -- not really -- until I saw that gentleman in the coffee shop.

Today I’m thinking about her a lot, that beautiful spirit I miss and how I have never really let myself feel that pain when she was taken away. Odd, I had been wracking my brain on how I could give an emotional center to my story and how I could give the main character a soul. I will give it Lightning's soul: a dog, a best friend and someone that the world didn’t have any further use for -- someone who was too old, too damaged and no one could possibly want -- someone who had endless patients and so much love to give: a dog named Van Gogh.