She's of Spanish descent, thirteen years old, and a soul of rare contentment. She's been a trouble free companion, except for a holiday decoration incident back in year one that caused one of my sisters to have a nervous breakdown and cancel Christmas. And then there was the time the neighbors gave her almost an entire ham (they didn't know she was Jewish) because they thought she was so cute. I was already pregnant at the time, or the resulting fallout would have caused me to reconsider parenthood.

She's not sad, she just likes to look wistful in photos. So successfully wistful that for years I had a photo of her on my invoices that said "Please pay so I can eat."