GOD SPELLED BACKWARDS IS DOG AND OTHER LIFE LESSONS

In my mind, the book still sits on a shelf in the tiny library of Oakridge Elementary School in Salt Lake City, Utah, about as far away from the Ozarks as a child could be. With my parents’ permission, I used my allowance and bought a hardback copy of Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls and donated it to the library so that other young readers at the school could experience what I just had. That was over fifty years ago. It’s doubtful whether the book survived, though if decimated by eager grimy hands or even stolen in order to become someone’s salvation, so be it. The donation served its purpose. It wasn’t just a book, after all, but a totem. For the first time ever, I understood this wasn’t just a story about a boy and his dogs. It wasn’t even about “Billy”, with whom I shared a name, the protagonist. It was the first time I could remember a book being about something other than just ‘what happens’. Like a clarion call, the author’s work taught me how a story could render hope, fear, regret, wonder, nature, love and even God. One who, all my life, has kept me guessing and takes from me just as often as He gives, with purpose, just like in the book. My whole life, I’ve had dogs that loved me unconditionally only to slip their chain one last time for the Great Beyond. When Little Ann crawls atop Little Dan’s grave and dies, I was being taught how one soul could bond with another, regardless of how many legs it has, and grieve. It’s a profound lesson at any age but as a young boy, I knew to look out for opportunities to fall in love on as deep a level as these souls and welcome not only the potential for that highest level of happiness but for complete and total annhilation that comes with it. There’s a sort of irony there and I’ve been on the lookout for it ever since, in literature, but mostly in life. I constantly seek the majestic or the divine though I wouldn’t say that I’m a religious man and, compared to certain others I happen to know, I wouldn’t consider myself all that well-read though I collect books and they are my most treasured possessions. My appetite for all of life’s joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, and what some people call God can be found on the pages, in text, and when it reveals itself, the truth is transformative, like the love Billy enjoyed from his dogs, a love I have been questing for my entire life, a love to be shared, discovered, and cherished. A love that appears in movies, in art, music, or inside a book on a shelf in a tiny school library, waiting to be read.