I just dropped off Mr. Wuss for boarding at the vet's. Come home, take down the carrying cage, Wuss scoots under the desk, go to the kitchen and take down a can of the prescription cat food, Wuss comes into the kitchen to wait beside his dish, pick Wuss up and whisk him off to some (comfortable, one hopes) cage in a building near my old Rockridge residence. He is worried but not too upset, he rubs his head against my fingers when I poke them through the cage. He still looks wrung out, although he's been eating pretty well now for some time. He's not the old Wuss anymore and maybe he never will be again. Getting old. I'd rather not leave him.

So, four days over a holiday weekend, time enough to circle the wagons, hold old hands and count the noses of the living. Noses we've known for all of our lives. Time for us to wish our aunt Vivienne goodbye and to take stock: Where we are, where we're going and what will inevitably come. Odd, but the dying part seems the easiest. Vivienne, if she had anything, had a good life, not only by society's rules and the rules of her generation, but a good life by most anyone's personal standards, the standards we honor when we ask ourselves honestly what we're doing and what we've done. Not easy, she outlived her husband and two sons, but good. A good life and a clean death, alive and active to the very last. How many lives can say that? Our lives? What can we say about them?

Time to stop. I've packed. Yes, I'll bring the cameras, but I always bring the cameras.