by Gabrielle Zevin
ONE-LINE SUMMARY: Naomi, a high school student, suffers a head trauma and consequently cannot remember the last four years of her life.
This is a terrific book. I was a big fan of Zevin’s Elsewhere which has an unusual and moving twist on what happens when you die. Zevin writes the kind of books that make you feel fulfilled after you finish it, but nervous about starting it because you know the book will bring up some deeper stuff that frankly, you don’t want to think about.
It’s difficult to explain the book — somehow, not much happens, but at the same time, everything happens. A teacher once told me that a short story is about the most important event in a person’s life, and a novel is about the most important time period of a person’s life. Memoirs isn’t driven by particular events or conflicts, but covers the most important time in Naomi’s life.
Humane Society claims Pets of Bel-Air buys from puppy mills
Statement from Pets of Bel-Air:
To the best of our knowledge, our beautiful puppies purchased out-of –state are from USDA approved pet breeders. We rely on our governmental agency to be sure that these breeders are inspected.
Dear Pets of Bel-Air,
Are you not aware that there are very few inspectors and many, many breeders? Way to blame the government for sticking your heads in the sand.
We do not condone puppy mills; we would never knowingly buy a dog from a puppy mill; and we are appalled by the possibility that this may have happened. We are investigating all of our sources so that we continue to nurture the finest and most reputable dogs from the best breeders, a practice that we’ve held central to our business since we opened nine years ago.
How could you not know where your puppies are coming from? Let me introduce you to something I like to call “math.”
In order to make a profit, the breeder has to spend less on creating the dog than what s/he gets for the dog. So take what you paid. Subtract a reasonable profit. The amount left over has to cover:
- Stud fees (assuming these are actually bred puppies, and not puppies created by throwing two dogs together)
- Deworming the puppies
- Regular heartworm treatment, applicable vaccinations, flea/tick treatment for parents/puppies
- Basic supplies: food, beds, treats, toys, vet care
- Kennels/housing facilities for parents and puppies
- People to wash/change bedding, clean the dogs
- People to feed the dogs, refill the water bowls, bring dogs to the vet when necessary
- People to play with the dogs/socialize them
- Transporting the puppies to the store
- Euthanizing dogs that are too ill/old
So what’s a puppymiller to do? Well, for starters, s/he can cut out all the nonessentials. Which leaves:
- Stud fees (assuming these are actually bred puppies, and not puppies created by throwing two dogs together)
Let’s just stick dogs in one big area and see what happens
- Deworming the puppies
Hey, the store that buys ‘em can treat ‘em
- Heartworm treatment, vaccinations, flea/tick treatment for parents/puppies
Store can pay for this, too!
- Basic supplies: food,
beds, treats, toys, vet care Okay, I have a choice of feeding them premium dog food or supermarket dog food…supermarket dog food = more profit for me
- Kennels/housing facilities for parents and puppies
- People to wash/change bedding, clean the dogs
They can be hosed off when I put them in the truck
- People to feed the dogs,
refill the water bowls, bring dogs to the vet when necessary
- People to play with the dogs/socialize them
HAHAHAHAHAHHA!
- Transporting the puppies to the store
- Euthanizing dogs that are too ill/old
There’s a bucket of water over there. Why should I pay a vet to euthanize a dog when I can just drown it?
Every employee at Pets of Bel Air is an animal lover, as evidenced by the care and love we show our puppies and kittens each day; the healthy environment we provide; and the respect we show each of you. We continue to be a community pet store you can trust.
You can be an animal lover, and still not want to see the truth. It’s nice you’re providing a healthy environment with care and love. But if you’ve never visited the breeding facilities you buy from, you have no way of knowing whether the puppies started out in equally nice conditions or, even worse, if there are still adult dogs at the facility living horrible lives just so their puppies can be sold for a profit.
It’s tempting to “rescue” a dog from a pet store. Don’t do it. Every dog or pet supply you buy from a pet store that sells dogs creates money in someone’s pocket that will only make them continue to produce these dogs.
I have suffered a disastrous technological setback this weekend.
Toward the end of last week, I noticed that my work laptop had begun acting a bit strange–freezing at odd moments and taking longer than usual to open applications. So I asked Chris to check if my computer had somehow picked up a virus.
He ran a disk scan, and then the computer refused to boot up. From what I understood, apparently I had some bad sectors and one of them, unfortunately, happened to be in the area which Windows needed to access to start up.
Which meant, essentially, that Chris had to reinstall Windows, which consequently wiped out my hard drive and all my work documents.
This is the third time Chris has had to wipe out my laptop, but the other two times, the problem was related to using my very old keyboard with the docked laptop. Both times we backed up all my documents in advance and then sent the computer back to the manufacturer for repair. This time, though, the computer went from sluggish to dead in about 30 seconds, and everything was gone.
Chris ran a file recovery program on the laptop and was able to recover a bunch of files. This means that I am currently going through a folder of 10,000 jpgs to delete the pictures I don’t want to save. This is made more difficult because of those 10,000 jpgs, perhaps 1% are actually work-related and the other 99% are primarily Windows icons/graphics and internet cached images.
The average guy would have a lot of porn images in this folder to sort through, and here I am specifically thinking of one of Chris’s friends.
All anyone would have learned about me, though, is that I have an unhealthy obsession with houses and lawn care products.
I used to look young for my age, but now I look as though I’ve spent too much time at Market Basket. In other words, I look as though my mother had abandoned me at an early age among the aisles of the supermarket, thus forcing me to forage for my own survival in a world where time no longer exists, where old people push and shove you relentlessly, and where half the stuff on sale is inexplicably unavailable.
About a month ago I went to Market Basket because they had Dairy Ease on sale. Dairy Ease is basically the same as Lactaid (milk with added lactase to help digest the lactose), only much, much tastier. The regular price of Dairy Ease is nearly five dollars, and Market Basket was advertising it at two for five dollars.
This is an incredible deal, so I went to two different Market Baskets during the sale week, specifically to buy Dairy Ease. The first Market Basket, in Ashland, had no Dairy Ease. I asked for and received a rain check for it. Then I hit the Market Basket in Woburn, where I found many Dairy Ease cartons, but only one of those was fat-free. I only like fat-free milk, so I bought the one lonely carton at the sale price and figured I’d just go later to a Market Basket to use my rain check.
My rain check is about to expire, so I went to the Market Basket in Burlington today. Some of you may remember this particular Market Basket as the tenth circle of Hell. Although this branch of the supermarket is conveniently located near my doctor’s office, it is rather inconveniently always filled with old people trudging through the aisles.
I don’t dislike old people, but I can’t stand seeing them, because they remind me of what I am becoming. I’ll let you in on a secret — they were YOUNG when they first walked through the Market Basket doors, and now they’ve been trapped in the Market Basket for days, wandering around in an attempt to find something on their shopping lists which was either moved to a different aisle with no explanation, or was simply missing from the shelf with nary a sticker or empty spot to prove it ever existed.
Other people in the store aren’t even trying to finish their shopping. They’ve just been standing in line at the checkout counters…FOREVER.
Today I was one of the unfortunate shoppers looking for particular items. In this case, I was looking for asparagus, which had been advertised in a sale beginning yesterday, and my Dairy Ease. Apparently sale items aren’t necessarily items the store wants to get rid of, because Market Basket didn’t have any. They didn’t even have a spot that said “Asparagus” over it.
After walking around and around the produce section and ducking the old guy who tried to strike up a conversation with me about the weight measures (I had no feelings on the weight measures, was my official stance), I finally gave up and asked someone where the asparagus was located.
I found out that asparagus “didn’t come in today.” Apparently asparagus gets days off like all the other hard-working vegetables.
Of course, there were also no cartons of Dairy Ease, and no stickers marked Dairy Ease, and no blank spots where Dairy Ease might once have been. For all I knew, Dairy Ease had chosen to stay home today as well, but I still spent too much time wandering up and down the dairy aisle, in case somehow I just wasn’t seeing it.
My rain check was about to expire, and I had no Dairy Ease. Which was just as well, because it turns out that using rain checks at Market Basket is an extremely rare and delicate situation, much like attempting to lure a unicorn with Paris Hilton as bait.
I had a rain check for bananas, and I figured I might as well use it. When I handed the rain check to the cashier, she looked at it curiously, and then called for a manager.
The manager looked at the rain check curiously. This did not bode well.
Two men were now in line behind me, having arrived as my groceries finished scanning. Poor men; they thought this line would be a FAST one.
The manager asked for the bananas. The bagger, an elderly gentlemen who looked like he’d seen it all, reached out a hand, grabbed the bananas, and slung them onto the check-out counter. I was impressed — this guy was a primo bagger — he knew what he’d bagged and where.
The manager said to me, “But the bananas are 49 cents a pound.”
I said, “Yes, but I’m supposed to get it at this price,” and I pointed to the rain check.
She re-weighed the bananas. “You don’t have five pounds,” she said.
“Right, I have less than five pounds. The amount on the rain check is the MAXIMUM I can purchase, so I can get anything up to five pounds.”
Dubiously, she voided the original banana purchase, and re-entered the new bananas. She started walking away, and I had to call her back because what she had done was weigh the bananas and charge me one dollar a pound.
Which means that the bananas, which originally cost me about $2.33, now were being charged to me at $4.75.
“Wait,” I said to the manager. “Is 4.75 the weight? That’s not the right price.”
She eyed the rain check again.
The bagger said, “It’s 3 pounds for the dollar.”
The manager looked confused.
I tried to explain. “I bought 4.75 pounds of bananas, so I’m supposed to get three pounds for a dollar which is, which is,” and here I blanked out. My father would have been so embarrassed of me.
The bagger said, “Thirty-three or thirty-four cents a pound.” This bagger should have been on the management track. So what if he was approximately twenty years older than the other employees? This guy understood MATH.
“Right!” I said. “So it’s supposed to be 4.75 times point 33.”
The manager voided out the $4.75. She did something, and the correct amount of about $1.56 popped up.
“Well, I don’t know, but I gave it to you anyway,” she said begrudgingly, as though I was pulling a fast one over her.
She left.
I tried to pay.
The cashier couldn’t get the cash register to get to the correct screen so she could run my credit card.
I was becoming afraid that the men in line behind me were going to come after me in the parking lot and beat me over the head with a loaf of French bread.
The cashier had to call back the manager, who had evidently forgotten to key out of her screen.
I had saved a grand total of 77 cents, and all I wanted for Christmas was my time back.