"The Dog Who Came To Stay" ...

"The Dog Who Came To Stay" by Hal Borland

Books I should have read while in school ...

... and probably took credit for ...

So, I have occasionally run across books I was supposed to have read for school and read them later as an adult ... For whatever reason this title stood out ... so I went to the library and checked it out ...

I was a terrible high school student ... not terrible in the sense of having really bad grades, but in the sense that I could read really fast and could generally coast to the 3 point needed to keep my car insurance cheap and every one off my back ... for the most part I could get away with it, skimming some books or reading cliff notes or just generally faking it (sorry APES teachers, it's true) ... there was one night as a junior where I read all of Wuthering Heights on a dare, but for the most part I half read things at best ...

As a result there are a number of books I never read that I have taken the occasional time to read as an adult ...

Every so often i will come across a book in a used book store and realize that it makes the list above ... please do bear in mind that I am not talking about a list of dozens of books, but of several total ...

Hal Borland's "The Dog Who Came To Stay" hit the mark as something I know I had held in my hands before, probably as a library book in the 5th grade or something ... so, I checked it out ...

I am pretty certain that I would not have appreciated this book in 1978 the way I do today. I probably got about 6 pages into it at the time and simply gave up ...

Today I found it engrossing, detailing the relationship we can have with our dogs. As a life long dog owner and currently owner of a very old and frail dog I will likely be losing soon, it really was choice reading ...

I am kind of glad now that I waited to read this book until 2008, even if it was not intentionally ...