. . . I'm still taking the loss of Cindy pretty hard. I keep looking for her at home; it's kind of weakly melancholy. She was 13, and she wasn't sick, really. Apparently she ate too much of some kind of fatty food--I don't know what. The pancreas has two functions, the vet tells me. One is to produce insulin to regulate blood sugar, the other is to produce enzymes which process fat. So she ate an overload of fat for a dog her age, and her pancreas flooded her system with these fat-eating enzymes. The enzymes began eating her. She looked good when I visited her on Saturday; I think she recognized me. But sometime Saturday night she took a turn for the worse. When I went in on Sunday morning, she was bleeding all over the place due to the attacking enzymes. The vet told me it was time to put her to sleep, that she was in great pain, and that there was no more hope. So we did; it was quick. The vet said it would be painless. I didn't want her to suffer anymore. It took longer than he predicted, though. The vet said she was fighting; she didn't want to leave me. Man, did I cry a whole lot once he said that.

You know, I should never go to the Humane Society. I have to hand it to Kiri for working there as long as she did, knowing how she feels about animals. If I'm lucky, I never go there except for once every couple of years because I'm an idiot and let my guard down. A high percentage of the time, I end up adopting an animal. That's the way it was with my Cindy. I had actually gone to the HS to see if I could adopt a rabbit. One of mine had died a few months before, and the remaining rabbit was very lonely. As luck would have it, there were no rabbits, but instead of just leaving, I hung out in the cat house for awhile and then made the big mistake of walking down the row of dog cages. I of course stropped to look in each one at the dogs. I was standing looking in the cage right before the one she was in, and I was moving to that cage when this little old Japanese man with a fistful of those red and blue HS leashes came around the corner. He said hi, so I looked over and said hi back to him. "Would you like to help me?" he asked. "Help you how?" I answered. "Well," he said, "it's just me today, and I need to walk every single one of these dogs." "Wow!" I said. "Sure, I'll help you walk them." So he came over to me, gave me one of the leashes, and said, "Which one do you want to walk?" I was at Cindy's cage at that time, looked down, and saw this really pathetic face look up at me. "I'll walk this one," I said. So we went in there, I put the leash on her, and she and I went walking out. She didn't have much energy; she was a little wobbly. We walked over near the cat cage, and I sat on the curb. She lay down and put her head on my lap. I could see she was just loaded with ticks. They were hanging like bunches of grapes all over her body. It seemed like the HS was just biding their time with her, not bothering to clean her up, waiting to put her down because no one would take her, especially with all those ticks. After I'd petted her for awhile, I took her back to the cage. "Aren't they going to take all those ticks off her?" I asked the guy, who was busy recruiting everyone in sight to walk a dog--very clever marketing when you think about it. "Yeah, it's hard," he said. "We're really shorthanded, so we just do the best we can." I looked at Cindy again. "How many more days does she have?" I asked the little old man. "I don't know," he answered, "but they might know at the reception desk." So like Fate had done this to me, I went over to the desk and asked about her. "Well," the woman said, "we don't put an exact time limit on them, but she's been here for awhile, and if I had to guess, I'd say she has another week maybe." I went back to the cage. Cindy lay on the ground; she looked so weak. She stood up, though, and stuck her nose through the wire. I scratched her nose for a bit. No one's ever going to take this dog, I thought. But we had too many dogs already, and I figured a week was a week, and who knows? Maybe some idiot like me might come in and adopt her.

I called them every morning. Finally it was a week later. I called--it was Sunday morning. "No," the person who answered the phone said, "she's still here." "Hold that dog," I said, "I'm coming over right now." And I did. The first thing we did was drive up to Longs Manoa where I bought tick and flea shampoo and a pair of tweezers. I drove over to the Lab School and took her to the stairs by the English Dept. office--the ones facing the weight room. We sat there for more than an hour. I picked off every tick I could find. Hundreds of them. Finally, when she appeared to be tick free, I drove her home, but, before I took her into the house, I gave her a tick and flea killing shampoo. She already seemed more energetic. It's tough to function, I figure, when hundreds of ticks are sucking out your blood supply.

So that's the story of yet one more big mistake trip to the Humane Society. But what a find. I say Cindy is the best dog I've ever had because she had the most beautiful temperament of any dog we've had. Even my folks agree; she was one in a million. She mothered every stray dog and cat we had, and every one we've adopted since. She had one habit I couldn't break: She loved to chase birds. But she never seemed to catch any, although I didn't like her scaring them.

Cindy is short for Cinderella. We mostly called her Cindy; I'm the only one who would call her Cinderella. She really led a fairytale life. I don't know if I'll ever find another dog like that. But, hey, we still have four more to keep us busy, and they're all special in their own way.

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