I have been a writer for years, mainly as a reporter, but I have always enjoyed history, especially non-mainstream stories buried inside old documents. My blog mostly centers around those stories. On occasion, though, I deviate and talk about my dog, vintage toys and what it's like to be middle-aged.
So I was sitting in the doctor’s office with Molly while she was waiting to get a vaccination — and I noticed the cover of a magazine with a picture of the most obese dachshund I have ever seen.
The poor dog looked like it had swallowed a large helium balloon. I won’t rewrite the story, but the dog became overweight by the well-intentioned actions of its elderly owners — and it took more than two years (and plastic surgery to remove the extra skin — which weighed more than two pounds) to get the dog healthy again.
Here’s how the woman who helped nurse the dog back to a healthy weight described seeing the dog for the first time.
“He was in the back of a small SUV and took up most of the space,” she recalls. “It was shocking to see his size.”
An Unfinished Life (2005) starring Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman, Jennifer Lopez and Becca Gardner is a story about living through pain.
The story starts off when Griff (Gardner) and her mother, Jean Gilkyson (Lopez) are sitting at the breakfast table in their apartment. Jean’s boyfriend, Gary Winston (played by Damian Wilson of Band of Brother, Homeland fame) is apologizing to a beaten, battered and bruised Jean about his actions. When she fails to forgive him, he erupts and storms off.
Griff begs her mother to leave — and they do, hitting the open road.
Dreams of going wherever they want to start a new life, though, are cut short by the lack of money and an unreliable car. So Jean and Griff land at the Wyoming ranch of Jean’s ex-father-in-law, Einar Gilkyson (Redford). Einar is not pleased to see her and is even more irritated when he realizes he has a grandchild he has never met.
His life, although not pleasant, is predictable and Einar wants to keep it that way.
Einar and hired hand Mitch Bradley (Freeman) live out their days on the farm in vastly different ways. Einar milks his sole cow and piddles around the farm while the severely injured Mitch just tries to make it through the day.
Although, it is a slow moving story, it’s worth the wait. You can tell early on that there is a lot of emotional, mental and physical pain each of the characters are forced to bear. The story is simple — how do people go on living well after an accident or a mistake forever alters their lives. As the story unfolds, it becomes obvious that some, like Mitch do it better than others and some, like Einar, choose to be bitter.
With a heavy story line that has the potential to be overly depressing, the husband-wife writing team of Mark Spragg and Virginia Korus Spragg sprinkle in enough humor to lighten the story. One particular amusing scene is when Griff fixes lunch for Einar and Mitch. She nonchalantly blurts out that she had a lesbian teacher. The men, somewhat taken back by the randomness of the comment become amused when she reveals her assumption that they were a gay couple.
Rated 5 out of 5. Perfect scenery, great characters — each one is interesting on their own — and enough resolution and closure to make the slowly unfolding story engaging, worthwhile, enjoyable and thought-provoking. DVD is available from Netflix, video stores or can be streamed from Amazon and other online services.
Memorable Quote
But what I can’t do is to continue to lie here every day and watch you mourn for a life you think you should have had. There are people everywhere who think they got dealt a bad hand, Einar – Mitch
Trivia
Although the story is set in Wyoming, it was actually filmed in Kamloops — a city in British Columbia. The scenery gives the movie a rustic, almost ‘Robert Redford western-movie’ quality to it. The movie is based on the novel of the same name.
Recently decoded portions of a diary and notebook kept by Confederate Lt. James M. Malbone, show that the officer was inclined to record gossip along with his officials duties. Most of his diary, which includes entries for 1863 and 1864, are about official business, like casualties and expenditures. However his self-created code placed throughout the book includes information about the illicit activities of fellow soldiers.
Sprinkled amid entries on camp recipes and casualties are encrypted passages in which Malbone dishes on such juicy topics as a fellow soldier who got caught in bed with another man’s wife.
You can read a transcript of the diary and view his homemade code by visiting the New York State Military Museum website where they have pdf copies of the diary and the transcription of the entries. They also provide this link to a photograph of Malbone.
Malbone was wounded in battle and the diary appears to be written after he was assigned a ‘desk job.’
Besides the gossip that the news article refer to the diary has quite a bit of interesting information in it. The entries include comments about guerrillas fighting the CSA, some of the casualties of war (including a boy who everyone thought was out of harm’s way, but was struck by a stray bullet and killed), and even a fairly long description of a group of inhabitants on ‘blue ridge,’ that Malbone does not describe in a very flattering manner (Oct. 19-20, 1863 entry).
Although the diary is 325-pages long, since it is a transcription, each page is relatively short, and since it has been saved as a pdf, it can be downloaded to your machine and read at your leisure.
Although this site began as a repository for American history stories, over time it essentially became a 'brain dump.' For more than a year, I've used the site to work through my beliefs and opinions in this post-truth era of political illiteracy.
So I was sitting in the doctor’s office with Molly while she was waiting to get a vaccination — and I noticed the cover of a magazine with a picture of the most obese dachshund I have ever seen.
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Charlie R. Claywell 