2010. I hope I forget that year someday. I wish I never lived it.
We discovered my beautiful dog who we had brought from Italy had an enlarged heart. He was put on a ton of medications and I wept. He was such an unusual dog. So sensitive but with a killer's instinct. Our Italian neighbors called him "furbo," clever. Sneaky. Wiley. All the above, but one of the most loving animals I've even known.
All summer long we refilled prescriptions and took him to the vet. When our vet could no longer stabilize his heart we took him to a specialist. In my best way I convinced myself that he could go on for years. When he started getting fluid in his chest and had to have it drained I cried. The vet said if he could manage six weeks between drainings we would carry on. I celebrated as each week went by. I worried. I held him. I talked to him in Italian and remembered how I chased him through the streets of our Italian village and how he once staged a great escape with our neighbors dogs. I wanted him to behave like a dog but every time he raced outside to bark I agonized over how much of his life the effort cost him...and me.
Early in the spring my husband was given a Blackberry at work to carry. I hated it. I hated that thing as much as is humanly possible to hate anything. I loathed it. It became my enemy. He never put it down. It went everywhere he and we went. It buzzed and he jumped. In the middle of dinner. All evening long. He ignored me and fondled it. I knew it was a link for him to the outside. A link that I could not touch because it was government issued and heavily passworded. I knew I would never break the password.
I knew he could not access porn on the Blackberry. The government blocked those sites and archived emails. Still, my husband became angry when I demanded he put the damn thing away. He told me he had to answer it. That's why they gave him the device. I told him he was entitled to dinner without being disturbed and that he should get overtime for all the time he spent answering emails. He growled. I yelled. It became an entity between us and more than once I wanted to smash it to hell.
