Walking The Dog
I was walking out our dog, a beagle, yesterday morning when an acquaintance approached me and engaged me in a tete-a-tete. We live in the same neighborhood, he’s a pedicab driver who would sometimes take us to our dog’s vet. He watched our dog play with another dog (a Chihuahua owned by my cousin) and then he said, with a face blanketed by amusement, “It’s so expensive to maintain a dog.” And I said yes even without mentally computing our dog’s expenses. But yes, it’s quite expensive to keep a dog these days. There's the dog food, the treats, the vitamins, the veterinary expenses, the medicines when they get sick, the accessories, the grooming expenses, etc. And then, he proceeded to tell me with a chuckle in his voice and melancholy in his eyes how he got sick last month, how he shivered and had high fever, and how his wife wouldn’t give him money for his medicines because they had--she alleged--none. He was just able to bu...