This will have to be in three different thread boxes.

1)

I'll start since I put this up here. Her name is Magicdog. She's the dog in the picture by my name. She was a gift from my father when I was going through a rough patch, and she, not in some metaphoric or over-pronounced general way, saved my life.

I was living in Starkville, MS, going to graduate school, and living in a small pink over/under duplex apartment just off campus that had a large pecan tree in the front yard. A few hundred feet down the hill sat the campus married housing unit, filled mainly with international grad students and their families. One of it's residents was a Korean man I saw almost every day walking by pushing a baby in a stroller. Magicdog hated this man, and it took me forever to figure out that it was because he would come into my yard while she was chained out on her dog run to steal pecans. He would collect a shirtfront full and dump them into the baby stroller with the baby and slowly walk away like nothing had happened, and she would choke herself hoarse trying to get at them for coming in our yard. I'd come home from teaching classes and find her berserk in the yard and not a single pecan sitting on my driveway or even tucked away in the grass though the boughs above us were loaded and opening.

The mystery of my angry mutt and pecanless yard was solved one day when I'd been out to the grocery store and just happened to pull in my driveway to catch this Korean man and his baby accomplice in the act. The man dumped his bounty into the stroller, waved at me, then hurried off down the rough street, pecans rattling out and breadcrumbing down the street behind them. I probably could have tracked him all the way to his apt. following his pecan trail.

2)

A few days later I'd returned home from a gig (I was in a band at the time) in the wee hours of the morning after a massive thunderstorm had blown through and there in a low corner of my drive huddled against the brick border was the mother lode. The wind had stripped most of the remaining pecans down while I'd been gone, and the water had floated them neatly into a pile. This was the first time I'd had a chance to collect any pecans, and I grew smug in my good fortune thinking some unkind things about the Korean man and feeling vindicated or chosen by God as rightful owner of the pecans. Take that, Korean guy and you're baby too.

I woke up the next day and decided that I should probably dry the pecans off, being that they were drenched from the storm. Sometimes pecans will grow this white mildew on and in them if they get wet. So, I put them on a cookie sheet in the oven and started grading papers for the class I taught. About thirty minutes into grading, I grew uncontrollably sleepy. Not an unusual response to grading English Comp papers, especially when you'd only had about three hours of sleep. I ended up passing out face down with my torso on the couch, the upper half of my legs on the ottoman, and the lower half of my legs extended out over nothing. Some time during my sleep, Magicdog climbed on top of me and walked the length of my body down to my feet where she curled into a ball and fell asleep herself. About an hour later I woke from an intense pain in my legs. Her weight had been counter-levering against the ligaments in my knees, feeling like a miniature form of hyper extension. I went to stand up and she fell from her sleeping perch on my heels to the floor with a thud and didn't move.

3)

The world was a weary and uncertain place. I felt dizzy and confused and walked straight to the door and went outside to straighten out my head. After a minute I went back inside and could smell nothing but natural gas. The pilot light in my tiny apartment's stove had gone out. Magic dog was still on the floor out cold, so I checked to make sure she was still breathing then took her out and chained her on her run outside, to come out of the gas haze. Who knows what might have happened if she hadn't been there, if she hadn't felt that something was wrong, grew scared and needed to be near me. Why she chose to walk the length of my body like a beam, to curl up on my feet hanging out over nothing, never made sense to me. She could have much easier curled up against my ribs on the soft couch. But she didn't. She did the unexplainable thing, something she's done many times since. Her small body provided just enough weight to make me uncomfortable, to bring me out of sleep before we both succumbed to asphyxiation. It might have been accidental, but she very much saved my life.

As a side note, I lived in that apartment another six months and in that time didn't eat a one of those pecans. The day I was moving out of it, and Starkville, for good I had almost all of my stuff loaded and ready to go when who should come up the street pushing his bay in a stroller but the Korean guy. It was something straight out of a movie, the big send off, the chance for closure. I stopped him out on the street and told him to wait, but he shook his head and kept going acting like I was trying to call the police on him. I grabbed his arm gently, and for some reason bowed to him with my hands out in front of me like a submission. He nodded that he would stay, and I ran inside and grabbed two of the absolute last things in my apartment--two pink and green Easter baskets full of pecans.

4)

I don't know why I had Easter baskets. There are a lot of things I don't understand about myself from that time. I gave the man the baskets of pecans and he smiled and nodded and said something in Korean (I guess it was Korean. I have told this story so many times now that to me he is Korean). Then he started to our the basket of pecans into the lap of his baby, who was now walking size. I stopped him and motioned he could keep the baskets as well, and surveyed them and nodded again and hung one over each stroller handle then made his way slowly up the hill never looking back.

This last part might seem the most unlikely thing ever, but there are two witnesses. The first was this guy named Brian who'd been my bass player and came by to see me off.

The second is Magicdog. She watched the whole transaction take place from a window in the apartment, barking like mad and getting slobber on the glass. To this day, any time she sees a pecan she growls a little.