Those of us with city dogs (what Rick Bragg calls "fancy dog people") might be aghast to read about the life of Speck, the rambunctious, mostly untrained, free-ranging and always-spoiling-for-a-fight rescue dog that Bragg writes about in his new memoir, "The Speckled Beauty."
Speck is not a neat and clean and properly neutered rescue dog adopted from the humane society, but was a bleeding, torn-up, blind in one eye and nearly dead Australian shepherd mix that Bragg scraped up off his rural Alabama driveway and somehow nursed back to health.
A former reporter for the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner and the author of 12 books, Bragg grew up in Possum Trot, Ala. Now in his 60s, he lives on a mountainside outside of Jacksonville, Ala., with his mother. ("I always came home, when I wasn't sure where else to go," he says.)
Bragg's writing can be wordy and overwrought, his anecdotes possibly exaggerated, but he's almost always entertaining, and this book is a fast read. He says that he learned storytelling from old men, "the backslid Bible scholars, day-drinkers, and Huddle House philosophers who chain-smoked Lucky Strikes" and who are mostly now gone, "laid to rest under a few inadequate words gouged into a granite slab."
OK, that's a bit much, though it does have a nice cadence.
Bragg is at his best here when he tells the story straight — it's a good story, the slow metamorphosis of this dog from vicious wild creature to somewhat benign companion.
Speck is a real dog, though he could also be a metaphor for Bragg — both have come crawling home looking for love and care. Both need to improve in just about every way and both have a deep love of food, especially Bragg's mother's biscuits. (We fancy dog owners would also be appalled by Speck's diet.)
Bragg himself is in poor health, in remission from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, with heart and kidney failure, chronic pneumonia, kidney stones, diabetes and depression. Oh, and his knees are shot. (He runs, he says, "with all the grace and speed of a potbelly stove.")
