My Buddy

I took the old dog to the vet today, because he was limping. I swear he was limping. This morning he didn't even want to stand up to follow me around the house. How was I supposed to know that it was some sort of quickly passing morning-time arthritis? As soon as we got to the vet, he turned frisky. He looked like a far younger dog. "See, Al, I'm fine. Let's go home now." Perhaps he caught some sort of a whiff of what happened to Stevie when I took her to the vet because she couldn't walk any more.

So anyway, he's not dying, even though I, of course, feel guilty for leaving him alone last weekend (and for the first week in August which he doesn't even know about yet, when he will experience his first time in a kennel.)

As for my other buddy, Mr. Issues, well, he called me today to let me know that he got hit by a car, and could I, please, give him a ride to the hospital to pick up some medical records from the ER docs for his real doctor. My thought, of course, was "What am I? A cab?" This was before I got the full sordid story. It turns out that the accident happened when he was in a real, actual cab, picked a fight with the cabbie about religion, and then got out of the cab and fled while it was stopped behind a turning vehicle. The cab driver then (allegedly by accident) ran him down. He's left with two sprained ankles, a concussion, and an injured back. According to his ambulance-chasing lawyer, he's actually in better shape, financially, if the cab driver did hit him by accident. If the cabbie meant to run him down, then it's no longer an accident and the insurance company washes their hands of the whole thing.

Never mind. It sounds like I'm making this shit up. Long story short, Buddy, the dog, will be fine, and Mr. Issues, well, who knows what is really going on in that world, but I did drive him around to do his errands and I didn't run him down with my car like a professional cab driver would.