Pet Milk: A Poem

I think it’s important to note that Stuart Dybek’s Pet Milk isn’t necessarily a STORY-story in the strictest sense of the word. It’s not something you’d tell your friend in a loud bar or expect a caveman to understand. It feels to me much more like a poem or an essay in that it rambles, and moseys this way and that, following the flippant thoughts and emotions of the sentimental author. That isn’t to say that it isn’t legitimate in what it is or not entertaining.

On a literal structural note, it starts with the narrator looking at his pet milk in his coffee, which reminds him of his grandma and her pet milk and other memories of her. That reminds him of the cream liqueur drinks he’d get with an old girlfriend at a bar, which makes him think about his girlfriend and their relationship and it climaxes on one pleasant memory he had with her on a train.

These are very whimsical, loosely associated events but they do follow a logic: the author’s nostalgia. There is literally nothing happening in the present tense other than Stuart Dybek sitting, drinking coffee and thinking about his life. This isn’t arbitrary, however, because a theme of this piece is time and memory, the circularity of time – especially as he remembers the boy waving to him and, in effect, he is the boy standing “outside of time.”

This last observation of his, remembering the boy he saw wave to him and his girlfriend, is indicative of something I think a lot of writers do for a story’s climax, which is to dwell on one minute detail, one lost moment, some passing nuance that now, because of the journey we’ve taken to lead us here, has some incredibly profound significance.