There’s no sense in having a blog if you can’t call attention to your friends when they’ve done something wonderful. At this Web site you can read about the forthcoming book The Good, Good Pig by Sy Montgomery. The book is a memoir of a pig named Christopher Hogwood and the people who loved him–particularly Sy (who has written a number of wonderful books about animals, and the way humans perceive them) and her husband Howard Mansfield, whose own books In the Memory House and The Bones of the Earth (to name just two) are meditations on the importance of place, the manipulation of history and the old Faulknerian dictum: “The past is never over. It isn’t even past.”
I went to college with Sy and Howard, worked on the campus newspaper (The Daily Orange) with them, and lived just a mile from them in New Hampshire twenty years ago when I was writing my first book. My family and I still visit them in New Hampshire about once every other year or so, so I had a chance to know the pig in question, and I can testify to his good-goodness.
Christopher Hogwood was named after the classical music conductor who, at the time of the pig’s birth was, I believe, the leader of the Hayden and Handel (or vice versa) Society. He is just a cute piglet in the pictures on the Web site, but each year, in the photos that almost always graced Sy and Howard’s Christmas cards, you could see him growing toward his full magnificence. At top weight, he was about 650 pounds, I think, but that pig could dance like Fred Astaire. Okay, I exaggerate, but he could move like Barry Sanders in the open field. He was a muse, and a pal for Howard and Sy, who also sheltered a border collie named Tess who’d been abused as a puppy and had once bad leg, but could really soar for a frisbee. (She’s featured in the slide show on the Web site.) Like a lot of border collies, she was also given to trying to “herd” small children, which was kind of comic when my sons were younger.
Tess and Chris died within a few months of each other, and that was a sad time. I’m eager to read the book, and renew my acquaintance.
Read an interview with Sy here. The interviewer never asked her if she made stupendous pies. So I would just like to put that on the record.