So, if you’ve been reading Mom, Interrupted for any length of time you know who this is: Elmer, my beloved basset hound. I’m not going to say that I love him more than any other member of my family, but I will say this: my relationship with Elmer is the only uncomplicated one I have.

He’s the only one who runs to greet me when I come home, and he tells me about his day. He’s barking incoherently, of course, but I know that he’s talking about the scorpion he faced down out on the lawn (read: he stands stock still and barks endlessly at a spot on the lawn), and about the cat who had the nerve to sit on our wall. He’s telling me that he chased the cat away, but we both know that he really hid behind the deck chair until the cat got bored and wandered off.

But mostly he’s yelling at me to get off the stick and get him his meatball already.

Elmer is seven, in direct defiance of my strict order not to get older, and has managed to develop Valley Fever, a fungal condition that we keep in check with twice-daily doses of fluconazole. In deference to his TMJ issues, we had to change the way we gave him his medicine: stuff the pill into a meatball, pair it up with a glucosamine tablet (in deference to his arthritis…he’s quite the little hypochondriac) and his vitamin C chew (to make the fluconazole more effective) and dump it in his food dish.

It’s just one dose, twice a day, but The Big E now has a meatball-shaped monkey on his back that makes him a real pleasure every twelve hours.

Not.

I’m sitting on the couch as I type, and I’m doing it while a long-eared dwarf dog has planted his stubby little paws on my leg, whining like a junkie who doesn’t care if he finds a clean needle.

All for the love of a turkey meatball.

Hang on, little buddy. Your dealer is on it.

© E. Stocking Evans 2012