By the time our appointment with the veterinarian at the Town & Country Veterinarian Hospital at Ogdensburg was completed, physical check-ups on Jack and Jill completed, bloodwork done, the reception area had begun to fill up, and though I felt distracted, I did note the presence of an increasing number of pets and their owners. One young woman had walked into one of the rooms set aside for physical examinations with a beautiful looking Golden Retriever, leaving an elderly man sitting outside in the reception area.

He was comfortably stout, and looked worn by life, glancing about at others gathered there. He struck up a conversation with my husband, standing in front of the reception desk to pay our bill and make arrangements for the following week's surgery for our two mopheads. I was seated with Jack and Jill and directly across the seating area there was a woman with a Boston Bull terrier and a Shih Tzsu, awaiting their appointment. An American, she told me, but living temporarily in Ottawa, scheduled to leave shortly for Arizona, she will be sorry to leave Ottawa where her family has made many friends. She was there lured by the fees charged in challenge to the off-putting expensive fees back in Ottawa.

Before long, the elderly man addressed me as well, and in a short space of time I learned that he had lost his wife who loved and knew how to expertly handle dogs, a year and a half ago. She had been eleven years his junior. They had one child, the young woman I'd seen earlier with the Golden. Her mother's death struck his daughter particularly hard, he said; introduction to the impermanence of life is hard at any age, obviously. She doted on the dog now, just as he doted on his daughter. Nothing is good enough for the dog, he said, the most expensive dog food is provided, and strict rules have been imposed by her in their household to avoid giving the dog, now twelve, any type of 'human food'.

This dog, he said was the precise opposite in personality to its predecessor, another Golden Retriever that had lived for 14 years whose passing he and his wife truly mourned. The earlier one was so smart, he told me, that once when his wife had locked herself out of their vehicle, she coaxed the dog to pull the car key out of the ignition and transmit it to her hand extended to receive it through the narrow opening that resulted when she had left the window open a few inches for air circulation. This one, he said, though his daughter loves it, has remained over its years mischief-prone, getting into all kinds of trouble.

When his daughter emerged with the dog, the man's face broke from its almost morose appearance to an instant beam of pride like the sun emerging from dark clouds, and he said "and this is my baby girl"; not meaning the dog, obviously. The young woman seemed shy and constrained, and I complimented them on how well the dog looked, almost puppy-like for its age, with a gleaming coat, alert eyes and a very handsome conformation.

And then I blurted a statement I was later to regret. I should have said that the baby in our family isn't as lovely in appearance as his, instead what I said was: our baby is now 52 years old, the youngest among three of our children, and the man's jaw dropped. He repeated: 52? Oh well, I said, we're 78, after all, and he said, looking like a truly sorry sack, that he was 70. I felt instantly regretful, as though I'd engaged in some kind of one-upsmanship of familial pride with a man whose fairly recent loss and emotional frailty didn't need anything like that.