Tag: Angel

Margerumalia – Five Year Anniversary

Eric Margerum

Newsletter – March 28, 2025

PHOTO: Angel wearing her festive holiday sweater on a winter walk. She’s wondering why we’re not jumping over the fallen tree limb.

Could it actually be five years from the start of the COVID epidemic? And do you know where you stashed your masks to pull them out for the upcoming Bird Flu epidemic? No? Hopefully we won’t need them.

I have a surreal and haunting memory of the spring blossoms and the budding trees from 2020. 

Angel and I continued to take our morning walks every day, keeping all of our trail buddies at a discrete distance if we stopped to say hello at all. This was before the vaccines were developed, of course, and I remember walking about fifty yards behind another hiker, smelling her shampoo and thinking, “If the virus is carried through the air and I can smell her scent, is six feet of social distancing even enough?” 

I developed a strong sense of self-preservation during that time and will admit that I consciously stood upwind of people who stopped to talk to me. The world was in lockdown, after all, and still people were dying by the hundreds, the thousands, every day. 

Then suddenly Mother Nature shook off her winter lockdown and started to run headlong into spring. My logical mind understood the natural state of things but my emotional mind couldn’t process this. We were on hold! Nature shouldn’t be breaking the the rules. No one should!

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” 

I guess I passed the test, but not before processing those opposed ideas. That required me to lean into my mixed feelings as well as the unnerving pull from two directions.

I remind myself to let my characters have such contradictory experiences as well. It makes for weighty moments in their lives, which is always a more interesting read.

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My middle grade novel, The Most Amazing Museum of Los Angeles, is available through The BookBaby Bookshop at https://store.bookbaby.com/book/the-most-amazing-museum-of-los-angeles

Margerumalia – Survival of the Friendliest

Eric Margerum

Newsletter – February 28, 2025

Dogs are remarkable companions who seem to be able to communicate with just their eyes. The photo of Angel above shows her speaking volumes with her eyes, stirring up so many memories and feelings that come rushing back to me even three years after her death.

My morning walk through the woods gives me a daily dose of canine affection as the dogs I’ve gotten to know stop and greet me. My wife refers to me as a dog whisperer, but I think I’m just getting affection from the ones who recognize a kindred spirit.

Lana, for example, a black lab mix with white feet, recognizes me from 100 yards away, gets permission to say hi, and runs at me full tilt like some kind of racing dog. I crouch or kneel to absorb her love-filled momentum, which sometimes knocks me over while I laugh like a boy. 

Gracie, about the size of Angel with mottled gray hair, gets so excited to greet me that she breaks into a prance, her forelegs literally dancing as she approaches. She appreciates the special attention of neck scratching and warm words. 

Phoebe, a full-sized something-doodle just recently got her hair trimmed and can see the world more easily now, including me. She also came running—again, with permission—and turned to let me stroke her back lengthwise, down to her stubby little curly-haired tail. 

Lyric is a long-haired border collie on tight voice command, whose whole body reveals her impatient enthusiasm as I approach. She’ll happily lick my face and then roll on her back for a generous belly rub.

Inside the Mind of a Dog – This Netflix documentary sheds light on how dogs broke away from the wolf pack to befriend human beings. Their expressive eyes are speculated to have had a lot to do with their connection to humans. The film lovingly examines that connection and how entirely dogs embraced that relationship. The documentarians coined the phrase “Survival of the Friendliest” to describe their partnership with people. 

If dogs could read, I think they would agree with most everything in that famous book by Dale Carnegie, How To Win Friends and Influence People. After all, they’ve been doing just that for millennia.

Did you know gray wolves and dogs, share 99.9 percent of their DNA? See Scientific American – “How Wolf Became Dog” (July 1, 2015).

Shortly after watching the Netflix documentary, the “Live Happy Now” podcast in my feed featured “The Secret Lives of Service Dogs, with Shannon Walker” (you can find it at livehappy.com, click on podcast). It builds nicely on the service dog portion of the film and shares the process of finding just the right dog for just the right service capacity.

I wish that humanity would finally learn the lesson of dog loyalty and the survival of the friendliest. The musical Les Miserables sums it up with this simple but profound lyric: “To love another person is to see the face of God.”

TTFN

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My middle grade novel, The Most Amazing Museum of Los Angeles, is available through The BookBaby Bookshop at https://store.bookbaby.com/book/the-most-amazing-museum-of-los-angeles