Why Dogs Chase Cars: Tales of a Beleaguered Boyhood

About this book

These fourteen funny stories tell the tale of a beleaguered boyhood down home where the dogs still run loose. As a boy growing up in the tiny backwater town of Forty-Five South Carolina (where everybody is pretty much one beer short of a six-pack) all Mendal Dawes wants is out. Its not just his hometown thats hopeless. Mendals father is just as bad. Embarrassing his son to death nearly every day Mr. Dawes is a parenting guides bad example. He buries stuff in the backyardfake toxic barrels imitation Burma Shave signs (BIRD ON A WIRE BIRD ON A PERCH FLY TOWARD HEAVEN FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH) yardstick collections. He calls Mendal "Fuzznuts" and makes him recite Marx and Durkheim daily and befriend a classmate rumored to have head lice. Mendal Dawes is a boy itching to get out of town to take the high road and leave the South and his dingbat dad far behindjust like those car-chasing dogs. But bottom line this funky sometimes outrageous and always very human tale is really about how Mendal discovers that neither he nor the dogs actually want to catch a ride that the hand that has fed them has a lot more to offer. On the way to watching that light dawn we also get to watch the Dawess precarious relationship with a place whose "gene pool is so shallow that it wouldnt take a Dr. Scholls insert to keep ones soles dry." To be consistently funny is a great gift. To be funny and cynical and empathetic all at the same time is George Singletons special gift put brilliantly into play in this new collection.