The tales of Lefty Mouse, J Edgar Pig and becoming Hank Williams's moggy are carried off with a deceptively light touch, serving as both a lament for a vanished blue-collar America and a tart commentary on today's politics.
One thing I can say, though, is that Democrats and like-minded independents are optimistic that either Barack Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton will do well against Mr. McCain, who seems to have little interest in the addressing widespread concern about health insurance, vanishing blue-collar jobs.
Your blue coat vanishes down Pond Road into imagined snowflakes with Gus at your side, his great tail swinging, but you will not reappear, tired and satisfied, and grief's repeated particles suffuse the air — like the dog yipping through the entire night, or the cat stretching awake, then curling as if to dream of her mother's milky nipples.
He died in full flight, doing what he loved, like his comrades in the army who got shot out of the sky and vanished into blue air - and all of us who worked with him are left with the clear memory of seeing an old man doing what he was passionate about and doing it at the top of his game.
Two per cent of the population — kids, grownups, the Pope, Gary Busey — are gone, poof, vanished, into the blue.
Some bits of gray bone came down on the slope below me, but the dust was caught in the wind and vanished into the blue vault of the sky, blowing out across the ocean.
A man named Anour Hassan recalled that when Taha's twelve-year-old son vanished in the Blue Nile, in 1954, Taha calmly told people who wanted to continue looking for the boy, "No, he's gone to a kinder father than I am".
When the last hint of blue had vanished into night, Turrell and the others wandered outside.
But he insisted that much UK money vanished "into the wide blue yonder.
I lowered my head under the surface and watched him until he vanished into the deep blue.
If the most populous blue state vanished from the electoral map, that most likely still help Republicans secure their next presidential victory.
