Huck: The Remarkable True Story of How One Lost Puppy Taught a Family--and a Whole Town--about Hope and Happy Endings Read Online Free PDF Page B

Manhattan Project, standing firm in her belief that nuclear weapons would only lead to more war. It was a brave thing to do. She thought about becoming a doctor, but loved the world of books and characters drawn from the imagination more than she did science. She set out to teach English literature. But life circumstances and World War II led her to nursing. She helped the wounded heal body and soul. It became her life’s work.
    My parents’ changing financial fortunes in general, and my father’s search for an employer interested in hiring a man with a razor-sharp mind but declining health, caused us to move around a lot.
    One of the darkest periods came during a brief move we made to New Orleans, where my father took a job expanding a wholesale drug company based in St. Louis. It was an odd fit. The boss didn’t know my father was the kind who would not join clubs. He was dismayed when my father put a television in the warehouse so the workers could watch the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. The relationship deteriorated quickly, and so did my father’s health. Now, forty years later, I can still vividly recall his gasping for air on the front porch on a thickly humid night. My father survived that episode and we moved back north, but life always seemed to teeter on the brink of catastrophe.
    We moved back north in the middle of winter. I didn’t understand why we could not just return to our old house in Connecticut, where life had been so safe and happy. We were headed instead for New Jersey (which, in my mind, was at least close to Connecticut), but it wasn’t home. Still, I couldn’t wait to get back to the part of the country that was familiar to me. I missed the landscape of my childhood, the solid maple trees with their large leaves, the slender white birch trees, rolling hills, peonies, forsythia, and the beach. My sister Barbara and I prayed for snow, though we no longer owned sleds or ice skates.
    Shortly before we moved, with our house in New Orleans full of boxes and commotion, someone went out the back gate followed by Scout. He took off. We all panicked. None of the neighbors knew us; there were no friends standing on their front porches screaming, “Scout’s loose!”
    My father realized Scout would not know how to get back to our house on his own, since we had lived there for such a short time and the terrain was still unfamiliar. My father combed the neighborhood for days looking for him. But his effort was for naught. He was unable to find our beloved dog. We had to move, leaving Scout behind. The pain was searing.
    On the day we moved, one of the last items to be loaded onto the truck was a mirror that had hung in the entrance hall in our house in Connecticut. “I’ll get it,” I volunteered. “You better wait for me,” my father said. “It’s too heavy for you.” I was then about twelve or thirteen years old; I thought he was wrong.
    I wanted to surprise him and show him I could do it. I also wanted to spare him any unnecessary labor because of his heart. When the mirror slipped through my hands and shattered into hundreds of pieces on the floor, I was devastated. I was disappointed in myself, upset that I’d done something my father asked me not to. I thought I was surely in for seven years of bad luck.
    A week later, on a bitter, dark January afternoon, the truck with all our possessions pulled up in front of our new house. It wasn’t Fairfield, Connecticut, but it would do. Nightfall came early; the truck was barely unloaded when the snow Barbara and I had been praying for started to softly fall. It did not stop for three days. The awkwardness of starting at yet another new school was put off. Barbara and I braved the frigid cold for hours on end, hurling ourselves into drifts, diving to the ground to make snow angels, packing tight snowballs with wet mitten-clad hands.
    In time, we settled into our uncertain family life.
    Before we left New Orleans, my father had put an ad in the