Lessons from a Goat

How did it come to this?

In my experience this is the kind of question you ask yourself on a steamy August morning when you have your arms around a urine-soaked goat, when the smell is ripe, and you’re struggling to hoist it into a makeshift harness hanging from the rafters. 

I never intended to have goats in my life. They just sort of wandered in. 

Well, the truth is that we do have a nice, flat yard. And we had a pretty aggressive and thorny blackberry hedge growing along the back fence. So when some friends sold their old Virginia farm and moved into town we took on their goats. There were three white females and old Gruffy. 

We’re gonna come back to Gruffy. 

We put up a solar powered electric fence to keep them from wandering off. The fence never seemed to work, and I also never really understood how it worked. We also didn’t know that two of the three females were pregnant. I found that out when my daughter called me one Saturday as I was driving back from yoga, to say that something was …happening with one of the goats. That was an interesting Saturday. 

So then for awhile we had baby goats, and they were cute. I mean aggressively cute. It wasn’t natural. But they were also impossible to contain. They were no end of trouble. 

So we ended up giving all the goats, except for old Gruffy, to a family that was much more equipped to care for them (as we were loading them for transport, one of the baby goats gave me a parting gift of getting loose and head-butting the crap out of my van’s windshield). 

All that was a few years ago. Since then it’s just been Gruffy and his special lady friend. His special lady friend is a sheep, by the way. She's sweet and fluffy, and I find their relationship charming as hell. (I’m the last one to separate the sheep and the goats.) I still grumbled about having a goat in my yard, though. You know, from time to time...

Then, in the hottest part of this last summer, Gruffy got sick. 

He stopped eating. He lost clumps of hair. He got terribly, terribly thin. He stopped standing up. 

He was in pretty bad shape when I put him on a tarp and dragged him from the back of the field to the shade in the tree by the back door. I was pretty sure he had parasites, so I bought goat dewormer and fed it to him. It didn’t seem to help. I was pretty sure Gruffy was going to die. 

What do you do with a dead goat? I wondered.

We called a vet to come look at him. 

The vet arrived in a big, white truck. He was just what you’d hope for in a country vet—calm and friendly, but not chatty—clearly more interested in the animal than the people connected to it. He gave Gruffy a shot of *real* medicine (apparently it was amateur hour with my deworming pellets). And then he told us that Gruffy might recover, but he really was in pretty bad shape. And he told us what we’d have to do for the goat every day. 

And so I found myself, in the back half of August, working with Gruffy every day. It wasn’t just feeding and watering. He needed to be lifted up and held in a standing position. He needed his legs massaged to get the blood back into them. He needed to relearn how to walk. Even when laying down he needed to be flipped from one side to another throughout the day. In the mornings he was soaked in his own filth. He smelled just awful. 

I smelled just awful. 

I washed up as much as I could but Gruffy had a pungency that really stuck to you. You’d get little whiffs of it. 

I grumbled a lot. Sometimes to myself, but more often out loud. But I wasn’t working alone. We all worked together to help Gruffy. I was just the most complainy about it. 

Eventually we dragged him into a shed and I rigged a sort of harness from the rafters so that he could stand for longer stretches of time without having me right there to stop him from falling. We gathered branches of vitamin-rich leaves to feed him. 

And he got better. He started walking on his own. He stopped needing the harness. He fattened back up. 

We had a nice, sturdy fence installed to enclose the field. A proper farm fence. 

Gruffy is out there now, with his lady friend (her name is Stella). They are munching happily on Autumn grass. It’s all pretty damn idyllic. I even made them supporting characters in the book I’m working on (under different names—the last thing I need is a legal battle with farm animals). 

How did it come to this?

I don’t actually think there’s a better question. I think it’s just about whether or not you can laugh when you ask it. 

Frog Pond

 So my dad started a youtube account.

What's that?

Why yes, it is a funny time to have parents, isn't it?

He’s an architect, this dad of mine, and so that’s what his videos are about. It’s a series of short stories and tidbits from the history and practice of architecture. Here’s one that I like a lot—it’s about various methods used to adjust the movement in very tall buildings:

Here’s another one about the legend of how the Corinthian column developed and how that eventually lead to one of the most famous drawings in history:

I love these videos. I love them because some of them surprise me and also because some of them—the rivalry between Bernini and Borromini, for instance—are stories I’ve heard many times before (though, being a dad myself, I realize now that part of the job is telling the same story a thousand times but always with the same invincible innocence, like it’s brand new). 

I also love these videos because I love my dad, and these are very much him.*

It was my dad, of course, who first taught me that drawing is not just fun, but a very fundamental and powerful way to communicate. When I’d ask a question he more often than not he’d grab a notecard and a pen from his front shirt pocket and draw the idea out (he always wears button-down shirts, often pink, and always with pens and notecards in the pocket).

So if you enjoy these, feel free to like and subscribe.

*Okay, I also love that you can see the full series DVD collection of Thundercats in the background, but you didn’t hear that from me. 

Mountain Hiking Comics

Over the weekend my friend Jason and I took his kids and my kids for an 8 mile hike up Old Rag Mountain. It's one of the best hikes in our area, full of boulder hopping and rock scrambling and an incredible view from the top. I made some comics about it:

Another bit of news: I was recently interviewed on the New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy podcast. If you want to listen to me yak for an hour about comics and picture books and storytelling and what the term "all ages" means to me then, by all means

CLICK THIS LINK.

Commissions Update: Still working away on these! Just a few more to go...

Ramming Speed

Head and Shoulders, Knees and...

I'm working on a post about how I love visiting my local library (let me count the ways), but it looks like that will have to wait for another day. Instead, here's a rough little comic from my notebook:

And here's another commission. I'm going to assume you know these guys.

True Dad Stories 7

This is another comic straight out of my little Moleskine notebook.

I took a break to draw this this morning because I've been working on the same watercolor illustration for three days now and it just refuses to come together. It's a page from Julia's House and my failed attempts are starting to eat into my stock of watercolor paper. So Frustrating! I had hoped to draw and paint these pages all in order, but I think I'm going to have to move past this page and come back to it later.

True Dad Stories 6

The image above is a small watercolor of Gravagna. I gave the original as a wedding gift for my friends Federica and Stephano who were married this past weekend in Gravagna. In a village this small a wedding is a particularly grand occasion. The last wedding here was ten years ago.

And while we're on the subject of husbands and wives, here is a small True Dad Story about a chance conversation on a train...

This comic is a bit lumpy, I know. It reads like the opening to a longer story and then sort of drops off.

Journal comics, or autobiographical comics, are a challenge to write. Do you err on the side of the "punch line" or on the side of strict adherence to the truth? The conversation above took place in Italian, a secondary language for both myself and the man I was speaking with. I almost didn't post this comic because it was difficult to get "right" (and I'm still not sure I did), but I figured when someone sees all your kids and assumes that you might have two or more (simultaneous) wives, well, that's a True Dad Story if ever there was one...

True Dad Stories 5

Yesterday in the seaside town of Monte Rosso I sat by the park, lost in the beauty of my surroundings and watching my three daughters play on the swings. All the world was peace and light, until I realized that, in fact, I was supposed to be watching my FOUR daughters.

Panic crashed into me like a boulder flung from the trebuchet of bad parenting.

I had offered to take all four of them to the park to give Anna a moment of peace, a walk alone, and a chance to look at hats. But apparently I’m like the last person you should leave kids with. I hadn’t seen Ronia in 15 minutes, maybe 20. I had left her on the steps of a church almost a block away (in a pedestrian-only section of the town, thank God). That’s a long time to leave a one-and-a-half year old.

When I careened up the street and around the corner, my three big girls trailing behind me, I found Ronia just where I had left her, happy as could be and under the care of a little (I’m not making this up) French circus family. They had a toddler of their own and the two babies were playing happily. The parents had convinced worried tourists not to call the police. They knew the dreamer-dad would realize his mistake and come running back.

Circus people.

As the scruffy long-haired dad and the mom in her flowing colors walked off with their toddler I felt like my own tribe had been looking out for me.

Still and all, I should probably be publicly flogged.

True Dad Stories 4

I fall for this one every time.

True Dad Stories 3

I hope you guys aren’t too bored by “True Dad Stories.” I know they’re no Robot Comics. Don’t worry, though, that little guy will be back soon. I’m giving him a break because everybody needs at least a little summer vacation!
The San Diego Comic Con is this week! Oh my friends, please think of me when you see those storm troopers!
And speaking of comics, look what arrived at the door yesterday!

True Dad Stories 2

I wasn’t sure if I should post this one or not. But you know, it’s a “true dad” story if ever there was one and if I can warn you guys about the hazards of potty training, well, at least I will have done something with my life. Also, it seems like I am becoming increasingly blind and useless in the early mornings as the years roll on. Maybe that’s what this comic is really about...

In other news, I’ve started a new painting of Gravagna. This is a personal painting that, if I pull it off, will hang in our house. At 4 feet in length it’s the biggest landscape I’ve ever attempted. I’m excited and a little intimidated. I’ve only managed to do one other painting since I’ve been here. It is this little (maybe 10X6?) landscape here:

This is the second time I’ve painted this little hill. The shape of that tree at the top draws me back. I’m thinking of putting this one up for sale on Etsy to raise funds for a new palette and some brushes. Here’s a little peek at my open air workspace, including my old pallet that I’ve had since I was 12, and belonged to my great aunt:

Finally, remember there’s a Legends of Zita giveaway over at Goodreads! It ends on July 15th.

True Dad Stories

So here's a little something I haven't done in awhile -a Journal Comic!

That's right. When you're a father of four and you get "special news" about your toothbrush you just gotta power on through. Save that problem for another day. A dad's life's not a Seinfeld episode.

In other news, we finally found the elusive Pontremoli Library and in said library I came across (and checked out) an excellent graphic novel adaptation of Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. It's in italian but it looks like an English version is available.