On March 12th Atticus Maxwell Finch Turns 10; Help Us Give To The Jimmy Fund and MSPCA Angell Animal Medical Center

(A Ken Stampfer photograph.)

On March 12^th Atticus Maxwell Finch will turn 10-years old.

What a decade it’s been.  What a life he’s lived.  And what a gift he’s given me.  Of course you already know all of this if you’ve read Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, andan Extraordinary Friendship, our shared memoir.

Ten years ago Atticus shocked his breeder, Paige Foster, when he was born an only puppy.  She was expecting more puppies to come out of his mother, and this was something she was never wrong about - until this night.  And from the first moment she held his tiny body in her hands Paige could feel there was something different about him – something special. During the first few weeks of his life Paige spent countless hours alone with the 'different' little puppy and this woman who led a life that was anything but charmed decided that for once, she would keep a puppy and not sell him as she had done with the more than the thousand she’d bred before.  Injuries she had sustained in an accident six months prior and had never healed would soon get better.  

That’s when I entered the picture.  I had lost Maxwell Garrison Gillis, an elderly miniature schnauzer I rescued less than a year and a half earlier.  My heart was broken and I wanted it fixed.  I searched for breeders through an on-line database and fate brought Paige and I together.  She showed me all the puppies she had for sale but when I didn’t see one I wanted, she asked me just what I was looking for.  I told her it was not so much about a certain look as it was a feel.  I told her how ‘Max’ had started to heal my jaded life and how his passing had broken that now-tender heart.

Paige then did something most others wouldn’t consider.  Paige was a woman with little happiness and she didn’t have many belongings.  All she really had that meant anything to her was that one special puppy.  But through our correspondence she believed that the same qualities he had within him that helped heal her could also heal me, and perhaps finish the job of saving me from myself that ‘Max’ had started.  Within a couple of days she sent Atticus to me and neither one of us could possibly understand how her selfless act would set the wheels of change in motion in so many lives. 

In the years since then much has transpired – enough to fill a book. 
Atticus did indeed finish the job Max started and brought me home to myself.  As I write in Following Atticus, “In telling the story of my friend, Atticus M. Finch, I often think of the something Antoine de Saint Exupery wrote, ‘Perhaps the act of love is my gently leading you back to yourself.’ For that’s what this little dog did. He led, I followed, and in the end I became the man I dreamed of being when I was a little boy.”      

If you’ve read the book you know how important the Jimmy Fund and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Angell Animal Medical Center are to us.  Over the course of two winters we climbed 147 4,000-foot peaks and raised thousands of dollars for the fight against cancer and for animals in need.
To mark Atticus’s tenth birthday I wanted to do something a little bit different with our book.  Many of you have already read it.  Some have even bought it for others.  And some still plan to buy it for themselves – and for others.  It is my hope that if you plan to read Following Atticus or to give it to someone else, that you buy it on March 12^th, his birthday, or in the few days following it.  If enough people buy it that week we’ll make it to the New York Times bestseller list for the week and if we do we’ll donate a $1,000 to the Jimmy Fund and a $1,000 to Angell Animal Medical Center. 

On March 12^th, we’ll post a reminder on our Facebook page along with the Following Atticus book trailer and ask you to share it with a note about what we hope to achieve.  It would be great if you would share this with your Facebook friends.

We’ve yet to grab the attention of the national media.  However, we’ve been wonderfully successful because of you, our readers, and your word of mouth.  It has meant all the difference.  We’ve not made the NY Times bestseller list yet but there have been weeks when we haven’t been far off.  We have been on the New England Independent Booksellers Association (NEIBA) bestseller list in each of the last seven months, and we’ve made it to the Top 10 of the Sunday Times of London (UK).  With your help and continued support, we will make it to the NY Times list soon enough.  And if we do it for the week of Atticus’s birthday, we’ll give back to those two organizations we believe in.  So pass the word – March 12 is the day!

(A note: not all booksellers report their sales to the New York Times.  Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, I-Tunes, Powells, and many of the bigger independent booksellers do.  It doesn’t matter whether you buy the hardcover or download an e-book.  All sales go towards making the list.)

Thank you for reading our story – a story that was started by the selflessness of a remarkable woman ten years ago and a thousand miles away.