From the vault of The Mad Pharmacist - a dog story
Dad was going through old files today and found the pre-web version of a blog entry, an essay he felt compelled to write in January, 1996. At the time, he printed it out on his dot matrix printer, so it won't convert to text easily. I'm typing it out but here's a link to a scan of the original from the vault of Jimmy Cost Jones, The Mad Pharmacist.
01/01/96 From the Massive Forearm Forum
A Christmas Carol for NUBU
There's no Charles Dickens here - no Bob Cratchit or Tiny Tim
--Just a little essay on the high cost of compassion --
Money was tight. A week earlier, the woman had quit her fifteen-year teaching job because "there's no longer any discipline. They're letting a small group of sociopathic kids ruin education for everybody (they call it 'mainstreaming') and it's drivin' me bonkers." So she scrimped & cut down a pine for a Christmas tree, placed a stand in the living room, festooned it with tiny bulbs and said "that'll do just fine."
Christmas came and went. Turkey Creek Landfill was the scene as the woman and a grizzled old guy, apparently her father, braved the long lines of vehicles disposing of the remnants of Yuletide. An abandoned, pregnant dog, swollen and distended, snatched an occasional morsel from the multitude of garbage bags tossed onto the pile. The old man fired off a quick prayer. "Please, Dear God, don't let her see that damn dog, 'cause we both know what'll happen. Amen!" Alas, it was too late; she rescued the canine like some mother pulling her drowning child from the pounding surf, and the old guy knew that his pleas for common sense would fall on deaf ears. The animal was already in labor and her emaciated condition required that she be taken to the vet for a c-section. The woman picked up the dog and her seven new puppies the following day, deposited them in a towel-lined box by the Christmas tree, and placed a receipt from the vet on the dining table.
Name, unknown, breed, unknown, read the receipt from the veterinarian, dated December 30, 1995, and in the lower right hand corner a figure was scribbled, $427.00 stamped PAID.
The old guy looked at the receipt for a moment, wiped his eyes (must have been a cinder or something), and said, "Don't worry, baby, come Hell or high-water, you did the right thing."
While eco-freaks and animal rights activists, equipped with signs proclaiming, "Save the Whales and Salamanders," priss and prance for news-cameras across the fruited plain, NuBu, short for "name unknown-breed unknown," and her puppies are safe and warm.
And that's the way it was, this Christmas season of 1995, as Dame Destiny typed out the future on the great word processor of life.
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