Day: September 17, 2013

This morning I said to my poem,

impatiently waiting to fly out into the world,

“not now, can’t you see I am going out to do my chores!,”

But my poem did not care,  she said

I was just being lazy, “no getting lazy!,” she

said in her raspy and demanding voice,

“I have a right to live…

When God gave you the creative spark,

you promised to use it, so get busy,

or he will send a thousand Cherubim to burn your cheeks.”

I whined, moaned, pleaded,

“I don’t have the strength or the time right now,

I can’t wring another drop out of this long day!”

Sometimes my poem ignores me, sometimes

she responds, and this time,

she climbed up onto the dining room table,

she lifted her skirt, winked, and shouted out

to the sky, and the ceiling fell on both of us,

and I said, “OK, OK,” and went to work.

And the moral of this poem is this:

An impatient poem cannot be reasoned with,

it just must come out.

In  way, I have been chasing sunsets my whole life. When I was a kid, I hid from my troubles in a big Providence Cemetery, the safest place I knew,  and watched the sun set over the tombstones. I chased sunsets on beaches, parks, over city skyscrapers. Izzy and I chased sunsets when I became a photographer, and i have chased them nearly every day since. Sometimes I even catch one, as I did today in the deep woods near our farm, I saw the sun settle down through the trees, saw the last rays cut across the forest floor, the sun seemed to be speaking to me, sending it’s long and graceful fingers right to my feet.

There is no more beautiful way to end a day than to chase a sunset, be mindful of time and color and light and meaning and nature, all in one gesture and time. This is the boundary between day and night, a magical and spiritual time, I could have reached out and touched the last rays, instead I blew them a kiss, mad fool that I am.

 I’m happy to share the first review of “Second Chance Dog: A Love Story,” due out November 5. This review appeared in Kirkus reviews, a respected and notoriously grumpy trade publication. The book will be available everywhere paper and e-books are sold and if you pre-order it from Battenkill Books, my local bookstore, Maria and I will both personalize and sign it. You can pre-order it here,

 You can support my work and a great independent bookstore.

“Best-selling author Katz (Going Home: Finding Peace When Pets Die, 2012, etc.) brings readers the intimate story of falling in love with a woman and her extremely protective pet dog.

“There was me, sixty-one, broke and bewildered,” writes Katz, the prolific author of books about pets and, in particular, dogs. “And there was Maria, a sad, brooding fiber artist in her forties…seeking to find her lost creative soul…and finally there was Frieda, aka “the Helldog,” a Rottweiler-shepherd mix who had been cruelly abandoned.” What starts out as a story of despair—for Katz and Maria, as their respective long-term marriages fell apart, and for Frieda, who was raised as a guard dog and then abandoned only to spend years living in the wild—turns to joy as faith, trust, friendship and love replace fear, extreme panic attacks and an over protectiveness bordering on dangerous. Nearly 20 years older than Maria, Katz felt a sense of urgency to create a life with her and Frieda, but he tamed his desperate need to love and be loved and learned that infinite patience would finally win the hearts of woman and canine. With Maria, he expressed tenderness and an awareness of her stalwart desire for independence—yet he was persistent in his marriage proposals. With Frieda, hundreds of pounds of beef jerky, steady training and an understanding of the dog’s past experiences helped create a bond that allowed Katz to move closer to both dog and the woman he felt was his soul mate. “The poet Rumi says to gamble everything for love if you’re a true human being,” he writes. “We did. We are.”

Bittersweet in its telling, Katz reminds readers of the importance of human and animal connections.”

I love the review, not only because it is good but because it completely got the point of the book. I like to say my blog is becoming my book and this is so, but it is also wonderful to write books and I am excited about this one. Just a few weeks to go. I’m planning a month-long online book tour for this book. Blog, Facebook, podcasts, videos. At the end of the book there is a link to a YouTube video where people can see how Frieda is living now. A neat thing to put in a book. I will be making some appearances in the Northeast but have decided to forego a national traveling tour for online promotions, it seems more effective for me.

In a windstorm, a timeless image, a shepherd and her sheep walking over a hill together.

Frieda is a working dog, through and through, Rottweiler’s and Shepherds are both herding and working and guard dogs, and Frieda is always looking out for Maria. On sunny days, she loves to sit in front of Maria’s Schoolhouse Studio with both legs crossed, guarding the studio and her much loved human. Frieda stays close to the studio unless a loud truck comes down the road and then she charges out and successfully drives it off. No truck has yet made it to the Studio Barn and Frieda is convinced this is due to her ferocious guarding. I always praise her when she runs a truck off, it makes her happy, keeps her focused.