| Soon that feeling will be for me an even more distant memory than it already is. I left California in 1995, and I’ve only seen Calvus a couple of times since then. I am going home tomorrow but will only have a short while to visit with my mother, and she tells me that Calvus has a very hard time even getting up. He has lost weight. He enjoys being taken outside to smell the nice smells on the wind, but he is an old man now. If we can take his character as an indicator of how happy he has been in his days on this earth, then he has lived a good life. People naturally want to be nice to him because he is so funny-looking and full of pep, and he has always given as good as he got. In this way he has been something of an inspiration to me. The world will be a little colder without him. To me it feels like things are already getting colder as Calvus prepares to leave them all behind. |