In early August, while the girls were at camp, I spent a lot of uninterrupted time with Tessie-cat. At almost-19 years, she’s even older (in cat years) than I am. I call her “my geriatric cat,” which is what she is. All she did for the whole week was to sit on the back on the couch, in her favorite spot, and sleep, taking brief breaks to eat or pee or poop or remind me that she depends on me for everything, including attention. After so many years, when it comes to our relationship, she’s really still just a kitten.

And during this time we had to spend together, a truth acutely implanted itself on my consciousness, that no relationship lasts forever, because all creatures die, for one reason or another, and probably far too soon. My relationship with Tessie, I thought, will eventually end as well, and probably not too many years hence.

A thought like that really puts in perspective how annoyed I get at her when she begs and begs and begs for attention, at the most inconvenient opportunities.

All those days sitting through Mrs. Owens’s seventh-grade algebra class, then years staring through Reverend Hardy’s sermons, and now centuries yawning through business meetings, she would have thought she’d have gotten used to the experience.

She shifted in her seat, as the company CEO flipped to another PowerPoint slide, animatedly spewing the latest rendition of corporate spin to the assembled audience. Sales figures and production are up! (Except in the divisions that the company did not purchase this year.) We’re launching several exciting new projects! (Because we weren’t able to finish the last ones.) We now control more gigabytes of shitty software than all of Microsoft and IBM combined! (And that’s something to brag about? Even if it were true?)

She glanced around. Hundreds more faces, just like hers. She was suddenly overtaken with isolation, that she could feel so alone amongst so many others just like herself.

Isn’t it funny, the snippets of life that our memories recall?

Lately, my online buddy and comrade in words, Jim “Suldog” Sullivan, has been talking about his days as a garage-band bassist. On Monday, he told a story of how one of his bandmates electrocuted him as a joke. And that reminded me of one of my own stories.

Okay, first of all, I must say one thing, as a fellow musician with experience in electrical engineering: Futzing with the ground wires is not a funny joke, dude. I don’t think I would have forgiven as readily as Jim did. He’s clearly a bigger man than I. (Or maybe that shock was simply bigger than either of us suspect.)

About 10 years ago, I was a keyboardist/bassist/guitarist/vocalist in a band called Priority One. Primarily, I played bass. But both D and I switched instruments between songs. So when I was playing keys, for example, he would pick up my bass. On one occasion, we gigged at a venue that had wiring problems. I knew they had wiring problems, because whenever I touched my keyboard’s metal chassis while also touching the microphone, I got a jolt. Either my keyboard or the mixing board (or both) was not grounded properly. As soon as I discovered the situation, I should have immediately done something about it. Maybe find a foam windscreen to insulate my lips from the mic. Or try plugging my keyboard into a different outlet. Or just run a wire from the microphone to the keyboard. (And if that shorted out the electrical system and blew a circuit breaker—or caught the place on fire—so much the better.)

I wasn’t going to put up another blog post today, but this little tidbit about friendships blew me away. And so I had to post it, and I had to post it now, and this is the right place to post it, so here it is. Even if you’re not religious, I hope you find this uplifting.

Dear Delilah,

Last night, I had some extra time before I had to pick up Margaret from work, so I took the kids on a tour of Dedham. (It was on the way.)

I passed the house where you used to live, where we once cooked homemade scrambled eggs and hash browns for breakfast, where