Old Dog Blues

This is what happens when you're sitting in the garden after lunch and wondering, "What would it look like to take a photo through the bottom of my water glass?"

As you can see, I clearly did not have enough to do yesterday. I read an entire New Yorker and part of my current book, Edmund White's exploration of Paris called "The Flâneur." But otherwise I mostly just sat with the dog, who seems to be struggling a bit. I am taking her back to the vet today after all, to get her breathing evaluated and perhaps some medicine to help her breathe easier. Even though the vet said last week that her heart is OK, I'm convinced she's slowly developing heart failure -- she's occasionally coughing and breathing heavily, seems to be retaining some fluid, and doesn't want to move around much. I remember with our other old dog, Ruby, that we got some medicine to make the heart pump more strongly and that did her a world of good, so I'm hoping for the same for Olga.

It's astonishing to me now that we walked all the way through the neighborhood housing estate less than a month ago, because now I can barely get her to walk out the front door. I'm hoping I can get her to the vet without having to carry her. She's a lot of dog to carry.

In a stunningly unfortunate example of bad timing, Dave is leaving this morning for a conference in the USA. He'll be gone all week. We had a talk yesterday about Olga and the fact that I may have to make decisions if she worsens while he's gone, though I think it's unlikely things will get that desperate that quickly. (Knock on wood!) Anyway, he told me to do whatever I have to do.

Ugh.

On a brighter note, I went into town yesterday evening to meet up with some visiting friends, Alan and Greg, who I haven't seen in years. I went to high school with Alan, and aside from our 20th reunion in 2004, I haven't seen him much since graduation in 1984. And I went to college with his husband Greg, who I definitely haven't seen since 1987 or so. Greg and I were involved in the LGBTQ+ student group on campus. It's just a fluke that these two guys I knew independently of each other wound up getting married.

And now they have a 16-year-old son, Derek, who I met for the first time. We had a great dinner full of reminiscing at a Brazilian place in Chinatown -- yes, there's a Brazilian place in Chinatown, for some reason -- and we exchanged stories and memories and probably bored poor Derek to death.

As Sandy Denny sang, "Who knows where the time goes?"