Walking My Seventy-Five-Year-Old Dog
by Billy Collins

She's painfully slow,
so I often have to stop and wait
while she sniffs some roadside weeds
as if she were reading the biography of a famous dog.

And she's not a pretty sight any more,
dragging one of her hind legs,
her coat too matted to brush or comb,
and a snout white as a marshmallow.

We usually walk down a disused road
that runs along the edge of a lake,
whose surface trembles in a high wind
and is slow to ice over as the months grow cold.

We don't walk very far before
she sits down on her worn haunches
and looks up at me with her rheumy eyes.
Then it's time to carry her back to the car.

Just thinking about the honesty in her eyes,
I realize I should tell you
she's not really seventy five. She's fourteen.
I guess I was trying to appeal to your sense

of the bizarre, the curiosities of the sideshow.
I mean who really cares about another person's dog?
Everything else I've said is true,
except the part about her being fourteen.

I mean she's old, but not that old,
and it's not nice to divulge the true age of a lady.

“Walking my Seventy-Five-Year-Old Dog” Permission by Chris Calhoun Agency, © Billy Collins,from his collection Whale Day and Other Poems, to be published by Random House in September. (buy now)

It's the birthday of novelist Charlotte Brontë (books by this author), born in Thornton, England (1816). A fellow writer described her as "a tiny, delicate, serious, little lady, with fair straight hair and steady eyes." Her father was an Anglican clergyman, and she grew up in the small village of Haworth in the moors of West Yorkshire, a place she later described to her publisher as "a strange uncivilized little place." Her mother died when she was young, and her father sent Charlotte and three of her sisters off to boarding school. The school was an unpleasant place — the girls were fed burnt porridge, bathed in freezing water, and supervised by harsh teachers who were not afraid of physical punishment. The school record of Charlotte from those years says: "Reads tolerably — Writes indifferently — Ciphers a little and works [sews] neatly. Knows nothing of Grammar, Geography, History or Accomplishments. Altogether clever for her age but knows nothing systematically." The conditions were so terrible that two of the Brontë sisters died there, at which point their father brought Charlotte and her sister Emily back home to join their two surviving siblings, and they were raised by their father and aunt. Life back in Haworth was a huge improvement for the girls, although the parsonage was drafty, and their aunt was a strict woman — villagers said she was so rigid that they could set their watches to the routine at the Brontë household.

In between their studies, the Brontë children had periods of freedom to do whatever they liked. They roamed across the moors and read from their father's library, which included books by Sir Walter Scott, John Bunyan, and John Milton.

As she grew older, Charlotte continued to write. She found work as a teacher, because it was one of the only available careers for a middle-class woman, but she didn't actually like teaching. She wondered if she could make a living with her writing. In 1845, she accidentally discovered a manuscript of poems written by her sister Emily. Inspired, Charlotte decided that they should publish a book of poetry with work by all three sisters, using androgynous pseudonyms — Currer for Charlotte, Ellis for Emily, and Acton for Anne. Brontë became Bell. They self-published the book, and only two copies were sold.

Next, Brontë wrote a novel, The Professor, but it was rejected. One publisher, George Smith, wrote a note saying that he would be happy to see other work by Currer Bell, and she found that sufficient encouragement to immediately begin work on a second novel. She hauled her portable wooden writing desk out to a flat stone on the banks of a nearby stream, and she wrote constantly. One year later, she had finished that second novel, called Jane Eyre. It was a huge sensation, and soon a publisher agreed to publish a book by the mysterious Ellis Bell, which was Emily's novel Wuthering Heights (1847).

It's the birthday of writer and naturalist John Muir (books by this author), born in Dunbar, Scotland (1838). In 1867, he was working at a carriage parts shop in Indianapolis when he almost lost one of his eyes in a freak accident. He later said, "I felt neither pain nor faintness, the thought was so tremendous that my right eye was gone — that I should never look at a flower again." He was so affected by the incident that he decided to quit his job and walk across the country, living as close to nature as possible.

He walked for a thousand miles, from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico, and then he sailed to Cuba, Panama, and finally California, which would become his home for the rest of his life. He fell in love with the Sierra Mountains in California, and spent much of his time hiking and camping there. He also visited Alaska, South America, Australia, Africa, China, Europe, and Japan, studying plants, animals, rocks, and glaciers. He was largely responsible for the creation of Yosemite National Park in 1890, and in 1892, he helped found the Sierra Club.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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