The photo above shows my back-to-school present: a paperback copy of Kin Platt's YA (the industry term for "young adult fiction") novel Sinbad and Me. For some bizarre reason this gem of a book is out of print so Becky purchased it for me online at enormous expense (enormous enough that she still refuses to tell me how much) as a back-to-school present because she has often heard me speak of how much I love it.
I love this book for many reasons. For openers, of course, it's a good book - an engaging and funny mystery that involves the mob, ghosts, pirates, long-dead sea captains and buried treasure, all of which converge on a small town in New York in the 1960's. Then there's the nostalgia: I came across a copy in the library at Royal Palms Elementary School in Phoenix during the spring of my seventh grade year and re-reading it always invokes that ethos. But perhaps best of all - or at least most pertinent to this blog - it was Sinbad and Me that gave birth to my lifelong (and as yet unrealized) ambition to own an English bulldog.
You see, I read a lot of mysteries - Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe, Peter Wimsey, Rumpole of the Bailey - but not in order to match wits with the author in sleuthing out a who-dunnit. I pay minimal attention to the clues - all those dropped handkerchiefs and left-handed men and varieties of cigar ash. The attraction for me is the characters. So, for me, Platt's book is less a mystery than the story of a twelve-year-old boy and his faithful canine companion. Sinbad and Steve sleep together, have regular nose-to-nose conferences on the living room floor, and generally hang out together. Reading the novel made me want a bulldog of my own, that's true; it also made me enjoy my own dog - a black-and-white mutt named Pal - more. I started taking him with me as I threw my paper route, for instance, and discovered his remarkable ability to memorize the various turns. (Well, when I say "memorize," I mean "pee on a succession of landmarks." Still. . . .) In fact, when I think of the dogs I have owned since - Macho the German shepherd, for instance, and Joey, about whom I have written elsewhere in this blog - I realize that a good deal of my enjoyment of them has come from the inspiration I first discovered in Sinbad and Me.
In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis describes a beatified woman whose large heart automatically mothered everyone she encountered.
"Every young man or boy that she met," the narrator's heavenly cicerone, George MacDonald, explains,
became her son - even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter."
"Isn't that a bit hard on her own parents?"
"No. There are those that steal other people's children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives."
I think that's how I feel about Platt's book: his lovely descriptions of the specific quirks and characteristics of one breed did not make me scorn my own mongrel by comparison, but made me prize him more because I could not begin to appreciate his special breeding and personality.
The next step in Lewis' story is that the narrator notices dozens of cats, dogs, and other animals following in the sainted woman's train. He asks if she kept a zoo, to which MacDonald replies that "every beast or bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ form the Father flows over into them."
Kin Platt gave me, at a young age, my first whiff of this sort of animal-mysticism and started me on the lifelong gift of getting to know dogs. If you do not have the good fortune to be married to an incredibly sensitive and generous wife, I suggest a visit to your local library. If they don't have the book, try inter-library loan. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who reads the novel as a result of this blog, or who has read it already (though the latter should beware of plot spoilers).
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