CHAPTER XXIV
DEWEY
Julia hit a patch of black ice and the Alfa spun suddenly out of control in the darkness on the road somewhere near Dilkon, where she had earlier stopped for gas. She was filled with burning regret at the stupid irony of it, that just as she was shown a way to go on with her life, she wasn't going to have one to go on with. Then, oddly enough, she began to comprehend why, since childhood, she hadn't cared for dogs.
She gripped the wheel and tried to steer into the skid. But when the weight of the car, acting counter to the spin, ripped the wheel from her hands, she banged on the brakes. The Alfa shuddered and reefed, but its awful progress went on. Julia felt the car tipping. She was sure they were about to roll. She pushed the puppy back down in the basket as the force of the spin flung him upwards.
But they didn't roll. Instead, they continued to skid laterally for many appalling yards. Facing the wrong way, the Alfa bumped over the shoulder of the road, into the shallow ditch beyond the shoulder, and came to an abrupt and jarring halt, that snapped Julia's head forward. Her right brow hit the steering wheel. The engine killed.
She came to a few moments later, aware that she was very cold, that there was a cut on her brow and the blood coming out of it was warm, and that the puppy--her right hand was on the back of his neck--was burning up with fever.
He was sinking. She had realized that driving down from the mesas, when he'd finally eaten a little of the kibble she had sprinkled in the basket around him, and then immediately spit it up. When she had stopped to clean him up and give him water he had seemed thirsty, but he was unable to drink. When she had moistened his lips, then put a few drops of water on his tongue, he had started hacking.
Her puppy needed help. He needed it now.
She wiped the blood from her face with the sleeve of her old suede blazer, then pumping the accelerator, she tried to start the engine. It turned over but wouldn't catch. A moment later she tried again but the results were the same.
She swiveled around, looking out through the windows. Nothing but blowing snow. No one to help for miles around. In a kind of waking nightmare, she imagined herself going for help, crossing the unfamiliar terrain on foot through the icy wind and snow with the puppy in her arms. He wouldn't survive it. Julia wasn't certain she would either. She slammed her fist against the steering wheel and felt the pain from that boinging up her arm.
"Give it a minute," she heard Paco say in her head. "You've flooded it, that's all."
Her breath caught.
She forced herself to wait five whole minutes, which she timed off on her watch, and which she spent tucking Juanita's jacket more tightly around the puppy so just his dark snout was poking out.
When Julia tried the engine again it turned over and caught immediately. She laughed. Maneuvering the Alfa out of the ditch was tricky. Not because she was stuck in soft ground, but because the ground was slick and frozen and the tires couldn't find traction.
"Cardboard," she heard Paco say; again in her head. She remembered the cardboard box from the urn that had contained his ashes. She grabbed it from her bag, then tore it down one of the seams. With the wind blowing around her, she wedged it behind the back wheels. Moments later, they were bumping over the edge of the gully and out, on their way again.
***
Julia stopped at the first gas station she came to when she hit Winslow. She abandoned the car near the bank of phones near the access road to I-40. She desperately dialed five of the veterinarians she found in the phone book. She got answering machines from four of them, which explained that because it was Christmas Eve they were accepting emergencies, but only from long-term clients. She peered through the car window at the puppy in the basket. He hadn't moved, hadn't stirred for the last forty miles. With the fifth number, she got a service. But the man on the other end of the line, although he listened as she breathlessly explained what an emergency this was, told her basically what she heard on the answering machines of the other veterinarians.
It was the same story a hundred miles later when she rolled into Flagstaff, where the weather conditions improved slightly, then again in Kingman, too. "That's a bad gash." said the man at the phone booth next to hers. "You need stitches and you might have a concussion." Julia barely remembered the injury. The blood on her face and clothes, however, may have been the reason people she had encountered at the Winslow Mobil station, then the Texaco in Flagstaff, had made such a wide circle around her.
"Petries Animal Emergency Clinic," said the woman through the phone after the eighth ring.
"Hello!" Julia said. "You're open."
"Twenty-four hours a day, every day," the woman said.
Forty-five minutes later, Julia stood before the check-in counter at the dingy clinic. She'd had trouble finding it, had circled the block have a dozen times before she'd finally discovered the parking lot and entrance to the clinic in the alley that ran parallel to the street. The woman behind the counter, wearing a grimy blue lab coat over her jeans and sweatshirt, was the same woman Julia spoke to on the phone from the gas station. She looked at the barely conscious puppy, as Julia held him in her arms in Juanita's jacket, then critically back at Julia. Julia could hear Christmas music--Manheim Steamroller--and laughter coming from the treatment area at the back of the building.
Fifteen minutes later the vet, overweight, about thirty years old, wearing a pair of reindeer antlers on his head, the elastic strap cutting into the folds of fat under his chin, read the thermometer he'd used to take the little dog's temperature, shook his head, and said to Julia, "Here's the deal; treatment is gonna run you a minimum of seven hundred, and it could go as high as a grand. Even with that, there aren't any guarantees."
"But you're going to do what you can?"
"Yes. But you opt for treatment, then I'm gonna want payment up front."
"Okay," she said, trying to remember how much credit she had left on her credit card, if she'd even remembered to pay the bill that month, and if not, where the nearest ATM might be.
"You go back to reception and take care of that part. I'll get things started in here, then I'll come out and talk to you again."
The charge of seven hundred was accepted on Julia's card. She signed the slip, crossed the waiting area and sat down on one of the wooden benches lining the walls. There were no other clients present, and a moment later, the receptionist in the dirty smock left her cubicle and went back to the party in the treatment area.
Julia waited a half an hour but no one came out to talk to her. The wind rattled the glass in the door and the window near the receptionist's cubicle. When Julia got up and returned back to the counter and tapped the little silver "Please Ring For Service" bell, the only response was that someone in the back turned the music up louder. She moved to the area behind the reception counter, then moved quietly down the hall to the double doors marked "No Admittance" at the end of the corridor, which led to the infirmary/lab. She stood on tiptoe and looked through the windows at the top of the doors. The receptionist was dancing with a cadaverous-looking attendant, and the vet was carving himself a huge section of the three-foot submarine sandwich laid out on the main examining table.
Since their arrival, Julia had had a bad feeling about the place and these people. She turned and headed back down the corridor, passed behind the receptionist's desk and followed the short corridor on the other side of the building to the examining room on the other side of the building where she'd left the puppy.
He was still on the table, exactly the way she'd left him; barely conscious, and shivering on the cold steel table. The vet hadn't done anything.
She grabbed Juanita's jacket from the floor under the table, tucked it around the puppy and picked him up. The vet arrived in the doorway. He was munching on a the sandwich wedge. "You really oughta just let me put him down." There was mustard on the front of his smock and on his chin. His reindeer antlers were crooked.
"Did you have the slightest intention of treating him?" Julia said.
"You waited too long to bring him in. If you could've brought him in this morning…" he shrugged and brushed off some of the cooking sugar.
"I didn't have him this morning." Julia said and tucked the puppy under her neck and over her shoulder. "You were just waiting for him to die."
"I was doing you a favor. He's so far gone. It'd take a miracle."
"Yes. Well, tonight's the night for them."
The vet smiled at her curiously. Julia saw the phone on the far wall. "Does the seven hundred dollars I've already paid entitle me to a phone call?"
"I planned on refunding your money. Minus fifty for the office visit."
"I need to use that phone."
"Go ahead," he said stepping back.
Holding the puppy, Julia called Steve's clinic in Los Angeles. She got the service. She knew that Steve had gone home for the holidays, but not his partner, Liz. Liz would get the page. Surely Liz would be there to meet her at about 6:00 A.M., the hour Julia expected to arrive.
"Wait," the vet had called just as Julia was rushing the puppy out the main entrance. She turned back. The vet stood there looking at her. He held an IV bag and a length of plastic tubing in his hands. "Potassium Chloride and dextrose," he said. "It might help. I can hook him up--his right forepaw, tape it real good--and then I'll help you close the top of the bag in your car window, adjust the drip so it'll last the whole trip."
Julia nodded.
"I've got one of those thermal blankets back there, the kind mountain climbers use. We get a shock case in now and then. It'll help keep him warm."
"Why are you doing this?"
"I don't know what the story is, don't really want to know, but there seems to be a lot riding on this puppy."
Julia smiled. "There is."
When they rocketed past Barstow Julia's puppy was still breathing, and breathing still when they hit Victorville and she caught the first hint of the pinkish gray glow in the east. Dawn of the new day, Julia thought, looking at Katcina--the Talawa--on the dashboard. Christmas Day.
It had been at the gas station in Winslow when Julia realized how exhausted she really was. Since then, because the radio wasn't working, and to keep herself from falling asleep at the wheel, she tried to explain to the puppy what his life would be like with five cats. She told him that--judging by his paddle-size feet--he was going to be a very big boy one day. In comparison, the cats were very small. He would have to be on his best behavior. When she wasn't explaining things to the puppy, she was singing, and in her head, in his beautifully off-key voice, she could hear Paco singing, too. They went through all the Christmas carols they knew, the entire range of Motown stuff that Paco had always so adored, then started on show tunes.
In Los Angeles, as Julia downshifted and got off the Hollywood freeway at Highland Avenue, the exit closest to the veterinary clinic, she and Paco were just completing the entire score of Westside Story, doing Somewhere for the second time, a song which had always reduced them both to sweet tears a long time before that was where one of them actually dwelled.
Julia came to a stop at the light at the intersection of La Brea Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard. She put her hand on the puppy's head. He was still alive, but his temperature was still way up, his breathing shallow, and despite Juanita's jacket and the silvery thermal blanket, she could still feel him trembling. In five minutes, however, she would be able to entrust him to Liz's care at Steve’s clinic. Maybe Liz could make him all right again.
It wasn't Liz, but Steve himself, who was waiting for Julia at the clinic. He must have heard the Alfa drive in, she figured, as she rushed with the puppy and the IV bag in her arms toward the opening door.
"Guess you're all over your driving phobia," he said.
He met her halfway out in the parking lot and took the puppy, still wrapped in Juanita's jacket, into his arms, but held onto the IV bag.
"Guess so," Julia said, and suddenly knew it was true.
. She caught the sidelong glance he gave her as he took in the cut on her head, the dried blood on her face and clothes.
"I must look like I've been fighting in the Punic Wars," she said.
"Jules, you've never looked better."
She followed him through the clinic waiting room and down the corridor.
"I didn't think you'd be here," she said. "I thought you were going home for the holidays."
They entered the lab. He nodded at the big gray cat (his), settled in one of the upper cages, peering out at them, his eyes all round and owly like children from The Village Of The Damned. "Bill screwed up that for me night before last when he sucked up about half a pound of tinsel off my Christmas tree like it was spaghetti. I had to operate to get it all out." Steve settled the brown puppy on the table and began the examination. "Then Jay called this--yesterday--morning. He said if you showed up asking for your driver's license (which I do--by the way--have), I was, under no circumstances, to return it to you. I called him to tell him you were all right when I heard the message you left for Liz on the service. He was frantic. He was trying to get up to the mesa all day, but the Grand Canyon's snowed in."
Julia wasn't surprised.
"He also told me all about the wonder pup."
"I see."
" I just had to stick around and find out what kind of super pooch/miracle dog it was that could make you fall in love with him." With his stethoscope, Steve listened to the puppy's heart and lungs. "He sure is a beauty."
Julia thought so, too.
"It's distemper," Steve said a few moments later, when he had completed his examination. "To be honest with you, Jules, the prognosis is pretty bad."
Julia felt faint.
"It would be bad even if he wasn't so undernourished, so far gone, with just about every parasite known to veterinary science. . . "
Julia gazed at Steve. She felt as though her legs had turned to rubber. "Don't say it," she whispered when she found her voice. "Don't say we have to put him to sleep. Please don’t give up on him"
"I wasn't going to, Jules," Steve said. He glanced at his cat, Bill, whom he’d gone to so much trouble to save from the grieving man who had wanted the cat put down. Then Steve studied Julia. "Lost causes are my best thing."
She had a feeling he was talking about her as well as her puppy.
"We'll do everything we can," Steve assured her. "Everything, up to and including--if we can get your little buddy stabilized--a trip north to see a specialist friend of mine at the School of Veterinary Medicine at UC Davis."
Julia nodded, choking back tears.
Steve smiled that smile that was so dear to her, the open and kind one she hadn't seen in such a long time. She watched as he administered an injection: three CCs of Vitamin B complex, then connected the puppy to another IV bag of potassium chloride and dextrose.
"There's gauze and antiseptic in the restroom," Steve said, looking at the cut on her head. "Bring it in here and I’ll get you cleaned up. You can grab a scrub gown from that cabinet over there so you can get out of the bloody shirt."
"Okay."
"There's also stuff to eat in the fridge. Then I think you should have a little snooze on the couch in the office."
"I don't think I can sleep."
"Then just rest for a while," he said.
Before she left the lab, she bent to kiss the velvet on the side of her puppy's snout.
Eventually, Julia did fall asleep on the ratty, but extremely comfy, couch in Steve's office, but not until she had called and spoken to Jay at the El Tovar.
"Did you find what you were looking for, Jules?" he said.
"Everything and more. I got the puppy, and, Jay, I got Paco back."
Julia heard Jay swallow with emotion. "I’m glad," he whispered. "How's your pooch?"
"We won't know for a while yet. It doesn't look good. There might be a chance."
"Whatever happens, you tried your very best."
"I think I did, too.."
"Going out to rescue that little guy is one of the most serif things anyone’s ever done, Jules. Paco would be proud."
"Maybe, but the question I have to ask is, who rescued who?"
"We're all here to rescue each other. That's what Paco wants us all to remember."
Julia heard Jay blow his nose. He was silent for a moment after that.
"Jay?"
"I’m here."
"How are you?"
"I’m fine, Jules . . . If you can tell me you are."
Julia smiled, "Jay, I think I can. I really think I can."
"Merry Christmas, old friend," Jay whispered.
"Merry, merry Christmas to you."
After her conversation with Jay, Julia settled onto the old sofa. She thought about her puppy and her mind turned back to the dog question again. She had never put it all together like this before. No wonder she'd kept her distance from the species. It all started with Robert, a Standard, umber-colored Dachshund, her mother, Claire, acquired just after graduating from High School. By the time Julia was three, faithful, old and patient Robert had transferred his affections entirely to her. It was Robert who listened with the most sympathy when she whined. And it was Robert she confided in and commiserated with. Life was good . . .Until Robert's patience failed him and he bit four children playing at the Morton house in a single afternoon.
"You really don't you know what's going on here, do you, Jules?" said Dee Dee Kaylis one afternoon several days after Robert ran amuck. Back then, Dee Dee was Julia's best friend of the human variety. She was five, like Julia, but with two elder brothers and therefore a lot more savvy.
Sure Julia knew. "Robert's catching a bus and going to his new home in the country," she said. "A farm. My mom said she'd take me out there to be with him this weekend. I can't go today because the bus is full."
Dee Dee raised an eyebrow. "Do you see any buses?"
Julia didn't.
The girls were waiting in the back of Claire's red Gremlin, parked outside the cinderblock building into which she (mom) had just taken Julia's dog.
Dee Dee rolled her eyes. "They're telling you stories."
That couldn't be right.
"Jules, listen to me . . . Robert's too old and crotchety. No one's going to take him. There's no new home . . . This isn't a bus station. It's the Dog Pound."
Julia still didn't understand what Dee Dee was talking about.
Dee Dee offered Julia a smile of scorn-tinged (what a moron) compassion. "Grow up, will you?" she sighed. "They're having Robert put to sleep."
Put to sleep?
" . . . Like when we found Art and Petey, floating at the top of the fish tank last summer. They were . . . dead. You know, dead? You don't get to see them anymore?"
Julia suddenly got the picture.
She was half way across the parking lot, no thought in mind but rescuing dear doggie, when Claire, returning to the car (sans Robert), caught her up in her arms and held her close. Claire was crying. The tears paralyzed Julia. This was the first time she'd ever seen her mother cry. The tears also seemed to confirm Dee Dee's astute assessment of Robert's situation.
About a year after Robert's departure, Julia's dad came home from a pet store with an eight-week-old German Shepherd puppy. They took a vote and he was christened Rufus. Afflicted when they got him--unbeknownst to them--Rufus was dead from parvo by the end of the week; a mere six days, but more than enough time enough for the Morgan family to have forged a mighty bond with him.
Finally, there was Rupert, a splendid Irish Setter, who slept each night snuggled between Julia and Renee (head on the pillow, under the covers), whom the family had for three enchanting years, until the Saturday afternoon he broke his line, vaulted the fence out back, and was later spotted trotting into the thick woods near the creek with a rabbit in his teeth. When he failed to come home, search parties were organized . . . every attempt was made . . . Rupert was never seen or heard from again.
After Rupert, Julia's family forswore dogs and switched their allegiance, first to small rodents, then to cats.
Robert, Rufus, Rupert: what an aching litany of canine loss that was. After Rupert, Julia had closed the door on--and only just remembered--one of the great lessons of her youth . . . Dogs don't last. Well, this one was going to, she promised herself, and she promised her puppy.
Just as she was drifting off, Steve came in carrying her cat Buckley, whom he had retrieved from a cage in the boarding room of the clinic.
"Is the puppy all right?" she said.
"No change yet, Jules. But your little guy's still holding his own. That's a very good sign." He deposited Buckley in Julia's arms. Julia was very happy to see her chubby cat.
The clinic was silent when Julia awakened at about 5:00 P.M. Through the window she saw it was growing dark outside. Buckley was cuddled up in the afghan near her feet. She sat up slowly. Her head hurt where she hit it on the Alfa’s steering wheel the night before.
The puppy.
Julia slipped her feet into her shoes, got up, left the office and walked quickly down the corridor to the lab. Steve was asleep, sitting on a stool with his head in his arms on an examining table. She moved to the bank of cages. The brown puppy was resting in the cage under Steve's gray cat, Bill. With her forehead against the cold stainless steel bars, she studied her puppy, saw the IV hooked to the bag of fluid on the stand outside the cage. He seemed to be sleeping. She put her fingers through the bars and touched his thin shoulder. The puppy opened his maple syrup eyes and looked at her. She heard him whimper. Recognition?
She felt Steve's hand on her shoulder.
"His fever's down," Steve said. "Your miracle dog just might make it."
In gratitude, Julia put her hand over Steve's still resting on her shoulder. She could feel the warmth of it. "I want to apologize," she said, "to you, to everyone who loves me. I've been so awful. I don't know how to explain my behavior, except--"
"You don't have to explain it to me, Jules."
She turned to look at him. Steve smiled--his kindliest one--the one Julia liked so much. "Someday," she said, "I'd really like to tell what happened, and I want to tell you all about what happened to me up on the mesa."
"Whenever you're ready," Steve said. Julia turned, gave him a quick hug, then turned back to her puppy. "What are you going to call him?" Steve asked then, looking down at the sleeping tike.
"Dewey," Julia said immediately.
She didn't even need to think about it.
EPILOGUE
January 2, 1999
Julia Berelli
Los Angeles, CA
Darling Girl,
Libby, Nick and I are sitting in the lounge waiting to board the plane home. It's delayed (a snow storm in Chicago is screwing up traffic all over the country). Spending the holidays with you, your parents and Renee, Steve, and Jay (who's a lot easier to be around minus that chip he always wore on his shoulder--where in hell does that saying come from, anyway?) has left my heart full to the brim. I can't wait until we're all together again at Easter when we meet Dewey Kayenta in Sedona. I can't wait to see those kids of Juanita's and his.
Twenty minutes ago we all kissed and cried and hugged good-bye at the curb outside the terminal. Libby and Nick and I headed inside, but as we were going in the door, I turned back for one more look at you. Just before you got back in the car, I saw you pause, turn your little face up to the bright afternoon sun, close your eyes and smile. Anyone else who saw you just then undoubtedly thought you were enjoying the simple pleasure of the heat of it on your skin. I know different. I know that in that moment you were checking in with Paco, reliving the same warm comfort you felt when you began to hear his voice again, and his soul embraced yours on the mesa. I swear, Jules, I could almost see my lovely boy standing with his arms around you. I think that's where he's always going to be, no matter where life takes you, no matter what new alliance you form. A flash later, as I turned and followed Libby and Nick through the door, I heard Paco say from somewhere very close, "I love the hell out of you, Pops; always have, always will." Jules, I know he's always going to be with me, too.
You said you were having trouble thinking of a way to end your story. I don't mean to presume, and don't feel obligated to use this if it isn't to your liking, but I think it should go something like this:
It's a temperate and brilliant day; New Year's Day. Julia is with her family at the Laurel Canyon dog park, located on a broad and rolling plateau nestled near the top of the Hollywood Hills off Mulholland Drive. In this completely fenced, seven-acre area, the fifty or so canines present run free.
Julia brings her hand to her forehead to use as a sun visor. She scans the tree-dotted acreage. She's looking for him.
A tick or two later, the young dog bursts out of the copse of acacias and scrub pine on one of the slopes. He barrels forward. What a sight! His ears are like airplane wings, his legs are like stilts, and his coat is a rich and sleek chestnut, a hue more common to horses. The blonde undercoat, the deeper chestnut muzzle and ears, and the stripe of white up the chest are all terrific designer touches. As the Hopi hound speeds toward his mistress, his tongue flaps, his ears flaps, even his long legs flaps in their preposterous gate. He has eyes only for Julia.
"Oh, Dewey," everyone hears her whisper when the pup arrived at the picnic table under the trees where the family is sitting. He pauses in front of her for what seemed like an emergency nose rub, then speeds away. "When you say his name, Julia," says Libby, "the tone of voice you use is the one I always imagined Christopher Robin would use whenever he sighs, 'You silly bear,' to Winnie-the-Pooh."
As Julia rises, she scoops up a mud-covered, blown-out tennis ball (there are dozens lying around the park). She tosses it upwards. Everyone watches as Dewey spring-bucks to the spot he calculates it will drop, then leaps Jordanesquely up through the ether for the pluck.
He fumbles it. The ball glances off his attenuated snout, and lands at Julia's feet. No matter. Her eyes brim with pride as she concentrates on his beloved back-end gamboling away. His sickle-tail is metro-noming joy as he recognizes Otis, a young, black Labrador, then Liberty, a black and white Springer. The two are his best doggy chums. The three dogs trot off together with their noses to the ground. Every square inch of the earth and all the rocks and trees are chockfull of doggy secret messages, and it's their imperative to unincript each one.
Dewey, a little more than a year old now, still has that puppy awkwardness. He prefers prancing to walking, dancing to standing still. But he also has moments of extraordinary grace. When he stands on the hill with his neck elongated, his elegant snout in the air and his ears squared, listening to what only he can hear, everyone is reminded of the passage in Sal's journal when he wrote about Juanita's dog, Juanita's heart, and described him as an exiled prince with "the wind and his nobility." Sal still doesn't think cats and dogs belong in the house, but he'll make an exception for this dog. On a number of occasions, family members have seen Sal with his hands over Dewey's velvet flopparino ears, gazing deeply into those soft dog eyes, where he says he, too, detects something of Paco's eyes.
Julia bends to retrieve the ball. It's sopping. "Odd, how you come to terms with things like doggy spit, when it's your dog," she laughs and tosses the doggy-spit-sodden ball. It lands between Dewey, Otis and Liberty who have just returned. The three dogs dive and scramble for it. This time Dewey wins the day and he's off to the other side of the park with the balls in his teeth.
Uncle Nick elbows Sal then nods toward Steve Kelly, who's sitting at the opposite end of the table. There's a softness in Steve's face when he looks at Julia, and something similar in hers whenever she looks at him. Eventually, they'll figure out what everyone else already knows; their long friendship is slowly turning into something much more. That's all right with Sal, although he frets that when these two combine households, visiting them will be like a trip to the Bronx Zoo. In any case, as he watches their long friendship turn to love he feels as though it was all somehow choreographed by his favorite Cloud Person, by his poem of a son, by his lovely boy, who, in all his wisdom, knew exactly what to choose a his legacy, as his something to last, as his final gift; not just the miracle pooch, but the understanding that to get the maximum joy from life, we must live it the Hopi Way--Paco's Way--with honesty and courage, one foot in front of the other, through each holy moment, with the knowledge that it doesn't end: The knowledge that there is an Afterlife. And that only serves to make richer the life we're living in the Here and Now.
The End
"Recuerdo"
From:
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Collected Lyrics
Harper & Row, Publishers
1981
Author's Note:
Thanks to my completely serif friends Michael Yazzolino, who convinced me publishing this on the web was the best and quickest way to share it, to Michael H. Lester, the real webmaster, for his design and operation of this lovely site; to my beautiful dog, Dewey, who makes every day a joy, and who truly is part of my heart; to Davey, who owns the rest of it, for his yipes-stripes coat, his crossed-eyes and loving nature, and the Kitty Kool to make that trip to the hospital in the grocery bag; and most of all to the incomparable John Brogna--the real life "all too brief, but definitive dissertation on living large," without whom, none of this would've been possible (Honey, it was a great ride).
Merry Christmas To All And To All A Goodnight.
Click on the paw print to return Home
