Literary Picks My Dog Skip

Author: Edward Pickering

In "My Dog Skip," Willie Morris remembers the dog to whom he was attached as a boy in small-town Mississippi during the 1940s and 50s. Though thin in dimension, this book is boundless in the love it contains.
The author's affection for Skip -- a fox-terrier of singular intelligence and loyalty -- radiates through the pages and across the years.
Morris begins the first chapter in the gentle voice that carries the book through to its end:
"I came across the a photograph of him not long ago, his black face with the long-snout sniffing at something in the air, his tail straight and pointing, his eyes flashing in some momentary excitement. "Looking at a faded photograph taken more than forty years before, even as a grown man, I would admit I still missed him."
In little more than 100 pages Morris recounts adventures and memorable episodes from his youth in Yazoo City, Miss. An only child, Morris bonded with Skip, given to him in 1943.
The two proved inseparable. Skip accompanied young Willie everywhere -- on jaunts after school and weekend rollicks, hunting and fishing trips with his father, visits to relatives in Jackson -- and even slept beside him at night.
Of the dogs familiar to us from literature, Skip must rank as one of the cleverest, most loyal, sportive and downright entertaining.
With Willie as teacher, Skip learned to play a number of sports, including football, at which he excelled as a tailback and kick returner. Famous throughout the town, Skip ran, or drove, wherever he pleased. In their "most imaginative intrigue" together, Skip and Willie fool old men on porches into believing that Skip -- a dog! -- is driving the car. Slowing the car to 10 or 15 miles, Willie dips beneath the dash, and Skip props his paws against the steering wheel, keeping it steady.
With his startling abilities, and predilection for adventure, Skip makes a delightful protagonist around which to construct a memoir.
Though Morris focuses on Skip, whom he rarely lets dodge the narrative lens, he also evokes a particular time and place: small-town wartime America.
No longer can boys of 13 years drive their fathers' cars down main street, play at all hours without regard to personal safety, or idle away Saturday afternoons at five-cent matinees. Willie and Skip inhabit a vanished world, like the river town of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, that appeals to audiences without so many possibilities.
Morris writes about Skip with a tenderness that makes the book both joyous and sad.
Skip and Willie go through everything together, including moments of fear and peril. Skip nearly succumbs to poison, escapes quicksand, and he and Willie face annihilation when the car brakes give out on a steep decline.
In a sense, this book tells a classic story -- that of boy and dog. And such stories can have only one true resolution.
In the final chapter of "My Dog Skip," Willie and Skip part company when Willie embarks for college.
At this point, Skip is old and worn, at the end of life. Willie is at the brink of life.
It goes without saying that another, more final separation awaits the two.
The book's ending will resonate with every person who, like this reviewer, has received the undivided love and loyalty of a dog.
The ending is as touching as it is true.
To have a devoted dog is a blessing, for "in the dangers of life," says Willie Morris, "loyalty and love are the best things of all, and the most lasting, and that is what Old Skip taught me that I carry with me now."