I Thought You Were Dead Book

This is a beautiful, sweet story filled with humor and wisdom. The relationships presented in this novel are emotionally connected to the reader. I loved the conversations that Paul has with his dog, Stella. I love the subtitle A Love Story . I Thought You Were Dead is indeed a love story in more than one aspect.

I like how the author points out that he is not the Pete Nelson who writes books about treehouses. I also happen to own Treehouses of the World by that other Pete Nelson.

I am very happy to have read this book. This was among the interesting books I bought when Borders closed in 2011. I now own both a printed hardcover copy and an audio book.

Favorite Passages:

"I'm home," Paul said, letting himself in and closing the door to keep out the cold.
"I thought you were dead," the dog said. Her name was Stella, and she was a mixed breed, half German shepherd and half yellow Labrador, but favoring the latter in appearance. . .

Stella had no sense of permanence and therefore assumed Paul was dead whenever he was out of sight, hearing, or smell.
_____

"Just thinking," Paul said. "If you could be a vegetable, what vegetable would you be?"
"Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?"
"There's been some debate. Why would you be a tomato?"
"To get next to all those hamburgers," the dog said.
"But if you were a tomato, you wouldn't want to eat hamburger."
"Of course I would. Why would I change, just because I'm a tomato?"
"You'd want tomato food. This has got to be the stupidest conversation we've ever had," Paul said.
"Actually, this is fairly typical," the dog said.
_____

"I'm just a bowl of Iams to you, aren't I? That's all I am."
"You're more than a bowl of food, Paul. You're a dish of water too. You even pick up my shit." Sometimes she'd crap in the middle of the sidewalk downtown and turn and say, "Be a dear and get that, would you, Paul?"
_____

"Cash always makes for a thoughtful gift. Just so you know."
_____

"Is she divorced?"
"Yeah, but I wouldn't want to see someone who wasn't."
_____

He suddenly realized what should have been obvious. All his friends were alcoholics. All of them were flawed and human and pathetic in their own way, all of them determined to keep the party of their lives going, all lost in their own small universe, their personal quest for the next best time, the next happy hour or happy minute or happy moment, and they were good people, and he loved them and wished them well, but they weren't part of his world anymore. More to the point, everything in Paul's new world was changing, and nothing in this world was.
_____

How difficult it was now to remember her siblings. She could remember running wild through the weeds, usually last in the order, but it never bothered her to be last, as long as she had someone to run with. She remembered a farm and, vaguely, a fat man playing the banjo in the twilight, singing:

What you gonna do when the liquor runs out, sweet thing?
What you gonna do when the liquor runs out, sweet thing?
What you gonna do when the liquor runs out?
Stand around the corner with your mouth in a pout,
Sweet thing, sweet thing, sweet thing.
_____

"How goes the struggle?" he asked Paul, wielding his chopsticks expertly while Paul used a fork. "Still working into the wee small ones? What's the new project? One of those Idiot books, right?"
"Morons," Paul corrected him. "The Idiot books are a bit more technical than ours."
"Those Idiot books are a great gimmick. What's this one about?"
"Nature."
"Nature for Morons?" Carl said. "God, are you perfect for that."
_____

"What kind of shitty son doesn't know when his own father's birthday is? I'll bet he knows when yours is."
"Well, he was there when I was born," Paul said. "If I was there when he was born, I'd probably remember too."
_____

He was five foot eleven, with decent posture, standing up, but with a tendency to slouch when he was sitting down, particularly in movie theaters, where he was usually quite uncomfortable, mostly owing to his not having an ass. He wished he could say he'd worked it off, better yet that he'd laughed it off, or lost it in Vegas, but the sad fact was that he'd been born without one, part of his heritage. For centuries, his Viking ancestors had rowed boats across the wine-dark seas of the North Atlantic seated on hard wooden planks - no doubt it was a question of erosion more than of genetics or evolution.
In compensation for his hereditary asslessness, he had decent looking legs, though a bit bowed. His feet were well shaped but his little toes turned in and tended to grow calluses and to blister if his socks were too thin. Structurally, his left leg was sound but his right knee was shot . . .
_____

"He took me to a Celine Dion concert."
"Oh, no," Paul said, feeling more optimistic. "I'm so sorry."
"It gets worse. For her encore, she brought up Michael Bolton for a special guest duet. They don't have that much cheese in all of Wisconsin."
_____

The future was easier for her to believe in, except that it was a fantasy.
_____

"Humans and dogs had learned to love one another, in a way that no other two species have ever learned to love one another. Out of all the other animals on the planet, there's never been another example of two species that decided to love one another."
"Not cats either."
"No, not cats," Paul said. "People love cats and cats certainly enjoy people, but cats don't lay down their lives and die for people the way dogs do. Cat's don't swim out into lakes and pull drowning children ashore, or run into burning buildings, or leap into the darkness when they hear a threatening noise. And if a person dies in a cabin in the woods, and there's a cat in the cabin with him, the cat will eat the human's dead body rather than starve to death, but a dog would starve to death too, rather than betray the friendship. Some people say that makes cats smarter, but I say that makes dogs better."
"So if you died, I couldn't eat you?"
"You wouldn't want to"
_____

"Are you all right? You seem sort of quiet."
"I'm good," he said. "Maybe I just used to be louder."
_____

The sky was a mat of slate, but there was no wind.
"I hate running into the wind," Paul told Carl. "It feels lie the whole universe is against me."
"What makes you so sure it's not?" Carl said, smiling.