Hank Kalet

My puppy is home. We picked her up tonight from the vet’s office and she’s moping around a bit.

The vet thought she was doing OK and that we could take it day by day with her at home.

She ate a bit of food today — a couple of burgers, if you can believe it — and kept it down. Once home she reverted to her new finicky habits, refusing a dog biscuit, eating a couple of small slices of cheese then refusing more.

I’m trying not to worry — perhaps she is trying to reacclimate. They took good care of her at the vet’s office (Annie and I are going to get a complex, thinking Honey wants new parents) and we may have too quickly tried to get food in her here.

I’m going to let her relax and not force anything on her.

And then we’ll wait.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

BlueJersey and Garden State Equality are kicking off a campaign to convince state legislators that civil unions are not good enough and that marriage equality — also known as gay marriage — is the only fair and honorable way to go.

I’ll have a column on the subject on Thursday in the South Brunswick Post and Friday in The Cranbury Press, focusing on the campaign and talking with John R. Bohrer, the Monroe resident who helped make the campaign happen.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Micawber Books is closing.

The Princeton book store has for many years been a personal landmark in the borough and a barrier against the encroachment of the big-box bookstores into my literary world.

Don’t get me wrong, I buy books at Borders and Barnes & Noble — it’s tough not to in this day and age — but Micawber has always been the place I could go to find on the shelves a new poet or essayist I’d yet to read, or an earlier edition of a book with its original artwork.

I can’t even begin to list the books I discovered there, though I did find a signed copy of Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise and Micawber was one of the bookstores at which you could find copies of the magazine-CD my organization Voices of Reason.

I’ve been shopping at the bookstore on and off for years — probably since shortly after it opened. I lived in Princeton in 1983, worked there as a reporter for two years in the 1990s, and loved spending time in the poetry section. I still do that — before meetings at our main office, sometimes afterward, and whenever I get into the borough.

That the shop has managed to stand for as long as it has is remarkable given the competition from the big boxes, but its location in downtown Princeton has been a plus — which is why Princeton University is taking over the block and opening a second U-Store location and why another, larger independent (Labyrinth Books) will be opening as part of a larger reconfiguration of the stretch of Nassau Street where Micawber does business.

Citing the university’s dependence on Micawber, Princeton University President Shirley M. Tilghman said when university officials were notified Micawber’s owners were investigating the sale of their business, it was imperative for Princeton’s academic community to identify “a worthy successor.”

Nearly a year ago, university officials said, they began the pursuit of an adequate replacement.

“It is virtually impossible to be a world-class research university if you do not have a
world-class scholarly bookstore,” President Tilghman said Monday.

“This is a community that needs and deserves an absolutely first-rate bookstore, and I can’t imagine a better successor to Micawber than Labyrinth,” she added in a prepared statement.

The Labyrith Web site makes it seem a good fit, similar in its catalogue to Micawber, but for me it won’t be Micawber.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Two tankas for the absent dog
for Honey

1.
rabbit in backyard
startled by crunch of dry leaves
white tail shooting off
as I drop bag in trash pail
yard empty with her absence

2.
rabbit in backyard
sitting grazing undisturbed
no bark, no mad chase
rabbit in quiet darkness
a squatter in your absence

Update on Honey’s condition: As of this moment, she remains at the South Brunswick Animal Hospital, where she apparently ate a little bit this morning. Our veterinarian is unsure if that is a good sign or not and is hoping to entice her into eating by giving her a hamburger a bit later. Honey is not what anyone would consider picky about food — she’ll eat anything, including onions, paper, twigs, other items not worth mentioning, pretty much anything, really. We are hoping to hear something more at about noon, the question being whether she comes home, stays at SBAH or has to see a specialist.

I’m cautiously optimistic, but worried and confused.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

The games begin. Mets, Scott Boras, Barry Zito (pictured) — this is what this offseason is supposed to be about.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick