BP Daily Podcast: Effectively Wild Episode 109: Eight Questions (and Answers) for the End of the Year

Roger Angell has a beautiful piece about EB White as a Personal History in the New Yorker (White was Angell's step-father). Angell recounts his own daughter's reaction to learning about the unfortunate destiny awaiting a pig at Andy's, as White's friends and family called him, Maine farm.

"Many in the family, including my children, have their own lasting and complex attachments to Andy and the Whites’ place. My daughter Alice, at about ten—an age when she’d read and been read “Charlotte’s Web” over and over again—was shocked to learn that a young pig in residence in an enclosure to the southwest of the garage would be converted to ham and bacon shortly after her departure in September. She worked late that evening, crayoning a large replica of Garth Williams’s “SOME PIG!” drawing in the book—the miracle web that saves Wilbur—and had me drive her back to the Whites’ that night, so she could secretly thumbtack it to the side of the pen. The agrarian Andy was startled but unmoved, and the pig went to his smoked reward on schedule."

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/02/14/050214fa_fact#ixzz2GNSHO3rN