OK, they’re not puppies anymore. They’re dogs. One is getting to be an old dog — Anna barks and grumbles a lot, has a mild case of arthritis and a milky film over her left eye. When we don’t pay her immediate attention, she stamps her feet and her little claws click on the wooden floor. Frasier, a little younger, is probably around 6, but he’s still as hyper and as playful as he was when we first brought him home. Actually, when we first brought him home, he was a pitiful thing, dehydrated, coughing some awful gurgling cough for weeks, recovering from when my grandmother drove him to us, a few hundred miles in her SUV, without giving him water, on one of the hottest days of summer. Anyway, since he’s gotten over that, he’s been done with the seriousness of life. Always smiling.
Here are pictures of them, dozens and dozens of miles away, in Virginia at my parents’ house. There is no way I could ever have a dog here in the city — I don’t know how people do it. But hardly a day goes by that I don’t wish I could plop Frasier on my lap, like this.
