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Chapter 16: Description: 16-3 Professional Essay: Pretty Girl
Book Title: Steps to Writing Well with Additional Readings
Printed By: Dwight Bargainer ( XXXXXXXXXX)
© 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning
16-3 Professional Essay: Pretty Girl
To help you read this essay analytically. For two other professional essays in Part Two that make
extensive use of description, see “To Bid the World Farewell” and “Two Ways of Viewing the River”.
Rick Bragg
An American journalist and writer of nonfiction, Rick Bragg was born in 1959 and raised in
north Alabama. Heavily influenced by his family’s long tradition of oral storytelling, Bragg’s
nonfiction novels focus on the dignity of those who grew up poverty-stricken in the
hardscra
le areas of the rural South. A long-time journalist, Bragg joined the staff of the
New York Times in 1994. Covering such stories as the Oklahoma City bombing, Bragg was
awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1996. Subsequently, Bragg has become a much sought-afte
speaker and reader based on the success of his non-fiction novels, most notably his memoi
All Over But the Shoutin’. Bragg cu
ently teaches in the journalism program at the
University of Alabama.
Pre-reading Thoughts: Think about a time in which you have been involved in
what others considered to be a “lost cause,” a situation, project, or person that
seemed to have little potential for success. How did it turn out? What kind of
investment did it require from you? What was the reward for your involvement?
Her name was perfect.
She came to them in the dead of night, in the cold. She was more than half dead,
starved down to bones, her hair completely eaten away by mange. She had been
un off from more than one yard when she finally crept into an empty doghouse in
the trees beyond my mother’s yard. At least she was out of the wind.
They found her, my mother and
other, in the daylight of the next day. They could
not even tell, at first, she was a dog.
“And it
oke my heart,” my mother said.
They did not call the vet because she knew what the vet would do. She was too
far gone to save; any fool could see that. My mama lives in the country and has to
un off two wandering dogs a week, but this time, “I just couldn’t. She couldn’t
even get up.” How do you run off a dog that cannot stand?
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The
oke-down dog had stumbled on two people who hate to give up on
anything, even a month-old newspaper. They save batteries that have not had a
spark of anything in them for a long, long time. My mother keeps pens that
stopped writing in 1974. My point is, there is always a little use, a little good, a
little life left in anything, and who are they to decide when something is done fo
good.
My
other Mark looked at her, at her tragic face, and named her.
“Hey, Pretty Girl,” he said.
It was like he could see beyond the ruin, or maybe into it. I don’t know.
Her hips were bad, which was probably why she was discarded in the first place,
and her teeth were worn down. Her eyes were clouded. But they fed her, and
gave her water, and bathed her in burnt motor oil, the way my people have been
curing the mange for generations. They got her looking less atrocious, and then
they called the vet.
The vet found she had heartworms. She was walking dead, anyway, at her age.
It was then I saw her, still a sack of bones. It would be a kindness, I told my
mother, to put her down. She nodded her head.
A month later I pulled into the driveway to see a beautiful white German
shepherd standing watch at the front of the house. It was not a miracle; he
ailments did not magically cease. But together, my mother and
other had
tended her, and even let her live in the house. She ate people food, and drank
uttermilk out of an aluminum pie tin. She was supposed to last, at most, a few
weeks or months. She lived three more years—decades, in dog years—following
my
other to the garden to watch for snakes and listen for thunder.
“I prayed for her,” my mother said. “Some people say you ain’t supposed to pray
for a dog, but …” And then after the gift of years, Pretty Girl began to fail, and
died. She is buried in the mountain pasture.
The hot weather will be on us soon. The garden is already planted. Some things
were planted according to science, according to soil and weather. And some
things were planted according to lore, the shape of the moon, and more. That is
fine with me. There are things we cannot explain, things beyond science, like how
a man could name a ravaged and dying dog, and have her rise inside that,
somehow, to make it true.
Chapter 16: Description: 16-3 Professional Essay: Pretty Girl
Book Title: Steps to Writing Well with Additional Readings
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Printed By: Dwight Bargainer ( XXXXXXXXXX)
© 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning
© 2021 Cengage Learning Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this work may by reproduced or used in any form or by any means -
graphic, electronic, or mechanical, or in any other manner - without the written permission of the copyright holder.