A Life in the Day

Dobby is a 15-year-old mouthy miniature pinscher with cataracts in his eyes, a limp from being run over by a car a decade ago and the heart of a lion... in the body of a puppy. While he barks bloody murder to get anyone to help him down off the couch, he can still jump up to the couch when he thinks no one’s watching. He sleeps a lot now but his ears still perk up at the sound of any crumb hitting the ground and while he can’t really run like he used to, he still canters like a mini stallion on his infrequent walls. He avoids the outdoors if it’s raining, refuses to eat soft foods despite not having most of his teeth and gets in your face to sniff you when he can’t see you, which is most of the time now as his eyes cloud with cataracts. But he still gets playful, crouching down, his butt and tail wagging when he’s offered a snack and prancing around my husband’s buddies while they play cards in hopes of a few table scraps. As I get older and the body aches a...

Photo by Papaioannou Kostas on Unsplash I'm a sucker for friendship stories. If a book has a strong, core friendship that lasts throughout the story, it's a good chance you've hooked me as a reader. Some of my favorite stories are adventure stories where a group of friends help each other achieve an impossible feat or where the main character defeats their nemesis with the help of their friends . Photo by Aman Shrivastava on Unsplash But while good friendships make for good stories, we don't encourage male friendships to thrive beyond childhood, and we don't encourage physical affection between them to extend beyond puberty. We tend to sexualize their bonds instead, creating rifts and establishing an environment of toxic masculinity . We tell our boys to be boys, to stop crying, to stop feeling or showing emotion after they reach a certain age (an age arbitrarily chosen by parents or the community they're raised in, by the way). We teach our boys ...