These last two days: So first my iPhone, essentially free a couple of years ago (accumulated points), yesterday made its death knell clear, ignoring a new Sim card and all factory resets; it’s now a pre-corpse of stumbling WiFi, no calls, no text, no Internet, no Siri and her prudish answers to my naughty questions, …
I took my frail old-girl kitty to the vet’s this morning for scheduled dental x-rays I somehow knew in my gut would be ugly in their revelations. And they were, even more than I had bargained for, absolutely crushing: a mass growing fast up near one eye. I thought she would at least be going …
There is nothing, just nothing they can giveyou, not for this. You’ve set the timethey will arrive with needles, somethingliquid clear and final, andsome sorries, surelyso the suffering will go out But for now, you markthe labored rise of ribs, furfloated into every cornerof your life, there will beso much less to clean, feelyour own breaths, halting there is …
The roller-coaster ride of old pets, another dip, another rise. Took my dear old Bug boy in today to our outstanding vet office, East Carolina Veterinary Service, sure in that awful down-in-the-bones way it was over, or the start of over, and even the vet was bracing me for the worst of news. Old boy has …
So it’s well after midnight, and my dear wife has awoken more than once to alert me to this, as Total Dingbat Kitty with the big paws snuffles and snorts his way through sleep in the plush pillow valley between us, and the chipped wine glass sits cold and empty in the air-conditioned computer light …
There’s just something about a bunny, apparently. As so many times before, as this morning, as I’m trying, vainly, to meditate, with enough focus issues without this to contend with, too: Our goofus half-hound Maggie goes absolutely batshit crazy over the sight of any of the little furry hoppers that call our part of the …
Few things are as heartbreaking to me as seeing someone at the veterinarian’s office with a much-loved animal for the very last time, with that shattering person struggling to hold it together, and the pet, through all its final suffering, still attentive to its adoring human. That kind of helpless grief and abiding devotion, that throbbing human …
We have one of those flimsy kitty water fountains with an amazingly tough little motor in it and a big reservoir of waiting water — at least when recently filled, as ours had been only last night. The water dispenses on its own through some combination of gravity and other science-y concepts that make my head hurt. …
SO IT’S LIKE this: Preparing to turn my stalwart four-paws companion of 12 years, my cat, Bug, my pal, the biggest fan of my singing, my eyeball, into a furry glow lamp to fry part of his bedeviling thyroid gland is frying every one of my own nerves as well. I joke like I think …