Thurber’s Tail: How NOT to Name a Puppy!
But I had always had a name in mind for a puppy that I had stumbled upon decades earlier.
A Thurber Carnival
When I was in the 10th grade, in 1978, my best friend Ayresie and I found a paperback book on a shelf in his basement that had the cover torn off.
I’d later learn the book was called “A Thurber Carnival,” a collection of observations, short stories and, best of all, funny cartoons, produced back in the 1930s and 1940s by the famous New Yorker magazine humorist James Thurber.
The cartoons and captions were offbeat and original. Ayresie and I laughed out loud as we thumbed through the book looking at them.
Homework soon beckoned for Ayresie — unlike me, he was a dedicated student and went on to graduate from West Point — and I agreed to go to the local library with him so he could research a paper.
We took “A Thurber Carnival” with us.
Ayresie didn’t get much work done though because I kept pointing out the funny cartoons and captions and reading them to him.
We laughed out loud so often we got repeated warnings from the librarian to “keep it down.”
Then I came across a short story called “The Dog that Bit People.”
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Copyright 2022 Tom Purcell, All Rights Reserved. Credit: Cagle.com
