A speculative mind

  Have you ever been on a quest? When I was in college my friends and I spent a weekend at the coast. We played games, did various touristy things, and had a good time (no, there wasn’t that much alcohol involved). We stopped in a little used bookstore in a small coastal town. It was cluttered with mismatched bookshelves and crates or boxes where there were no bookshelves. If there was any organization to it, the system was known only to the owner. That old used book smell permeated everything, a sweet musty odor that coated the back of your sinuses. In other words, it was a great bookstore. One to meander through the stacks of detritus where you might find a hidden gem. In the midst of our search, one of us found something and started to laugh. We all joined round. The object at hand was a book entitled The Platypus of Doom by Arthur B. Cover. But wait; there’s more! The back cover promised more dangerous creatures inside the book: The Armadillo of Destruction, the Aardvark of ...

  Back when I was of an age that was old enough to take on a summer job (I must have been 12 or 13) opportunity presented itself in the form of “Mrs. B.” I don’t think I ever met Mrs. B., but she bussed kids out to the fields where in early summer we would pick Strawberries, and late summer we would pick beans. We didn’t get paid a lot, but we did get paid! This was the first real money most of us had ever earned other than an allowance, and my mother didn’t believe in allowances. She had seen too many kids who expected to get paid for doing things they should have been doing anyway, and some who wanted to get paid for doing nothing. But field work was real work, and you got paid based on how much you picked. If you laid around and did nothing, you got paid nothing. I think we got 80 cents a crate for strawberries. I don’t remember how much we got paid for beans, but it was by weight. I made it through one full season of strawberry picking, but the next year I only made it a few ...

  I think I was half-way through this book before I realized I was saying the title wrong. The word in the title was “Furry” and not “Fury.” This is the first book I have read that is in the Chet and Bernie mysteries by Spencer Quinn. It is not the first book in the series, (it is actually the sixth) and after having read it, I can say that I don’t think it made any difference to me that I had not read the earlier books. I was able to grasp the characters and their relationships just fine. The book is narrated in first-person by Chet. Chet is Bernie’s dog. He has many characteristics you would expect in a dog. He is fiercely loyal to Bernie. He experiences things through his nose and his ears to a degree that humans can’t begin to fathom.   Chet can understand English words quite well (he would have to if he is the narrator) but metaphors and figures of speech throw him. Check out this example when Bernie is counting out money: “Three grand on the nose,” Bernie said, altho...