Afterwards my friend took the coffin in the house to pick up the dog. A maid had wrapped the body in the rug. The old woman insisted that the dog be buried with the rug and its head facing West in a grave near the rose garden, pointing towards China. My friend buried the dog with its head pointing towards Los Angeles.

As he carried the coffin outside he peeked in at the thousand-dollar rug. Beautiful design, he said to himself. All you would have to do would be to vacuum it a little and it would be as good as new.

My friend is not generally known as a sentimentalist. Stupid dead dog! he said to himself as he neared the grave, Damn dead dog!

‘But I did it,’ he told me. ‘I buried that dog with the rug and I don’t know why. It’s a question that I’ll ask myself forever. Sometimes when it rains at night in the winter, I think of that rug down there in the grave, wrapped around a dog.’

Ernest Hemingway’s Typist

It sounds like religious music. A friend of mine just came back from New York where he had Ernest Hemingway’s typist do some typing for him.

He’s a successful writer, so he went and got the very best, which happens to be the woman who did Ernest Hemingway’s typing. It’s enough to take your breath away, to marble your lungs with silence.

Ernest Hemingway’s typist!

She’s every young writer’s dream come true with the appearance of her hands which are like a harpsichord and the perfect intensity of her gaze and all to be followed by the profound sound of her typing.

He paid her fifteen dollars an hour. That’s more money than a plumber or an electrician gets.

$120 a day! for a typist!

He said that she does everything for you. You just hand her the copy and like a miracle you have attractive, correct spelling and punctuation that is so beautiful that it brings tears to your eyes and paragraphs that look like Greek temples and she even finishes sentences for you.

She’s Ernest Hemingway’s

She’s Ernest Hemingway’s typist.

Homage to the San Francisco YMCA

Once upon a time in San Francisco there was a man who really liked the finer things in life, especially poetry. He liked good verse.

He could afford to indulge himself in this liking, which meant that he didn’t have to work because he was receiving a generous pension that was the result of a 1920s investment that his grandfather had made in a private insane asylum that was operating quite profitably in Southern California.