Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

  I grew up in an apartment in the city where a pet was not a possibility. Nonetheless, my love for animals started here. Our landlords had a smooth-haired terrier I quickly bonded with and even after we moved away, I never forgot Nikki, though I saw him only one more time in his declining years. After years of hard work and sacrifice my parents realized the dream of home ownership in the suburbs some twenty minutes south of Boston. For ten-year-old me, the most promising development was the groundwork set for an animal in my life. Before that happened, however, I bonded with my neighbor’s dogs. Ben was the first, already an old black lab by the time we moved next door, and one of the smartest dogs I have ever seen. I have vivid memories of the old dog turning his head in response whenever I called him by name and staring at me awaiting what I had to say. I would ask him, “Where is the ball?” and he would run to retrieve it from under the bushes the separated our yards and brin...

 Perhaps what fascinates me most about unfinished works is that they leave so much to the speculation. What is left to us are clues to a mystery that, if they could be solved, would tell the full story that exists only within the artist’s imagination. I make a point of seeking out examples of works left incomplete deliberately (a decision often born out of artistic frustration) or as casualties of finances, destruction or death of the artist. It’s become a hobby to fit these tantalizing pieces into an artistic canon and patching together what the artist envisioned. What if Jane Austen had finished Sanditon and what was the true ending (though letters left behind have officially confirmed the identity of the murderer) of Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood ? Though it takes turns conventional and breathless soon after Henry James’s The Sense of the Past begins so atmospherically one wishes the author had not abandoned it. Even cinema has its ghosts. Existing scraps from Orson Wel...