What You Discovered About Yourself In Raising

Walter Had Never Liked Cats. They'd Seemed To Him The Sociopaths Of The Pet World, A Species Domesticated As An Evil Necessary For The Control Of Rodents And Subsequently Fetishized The Way Unhappy Countries Fetishize Their Militaries, Saluting The Uniforms Of Killers As Cat Owners Stroke Their Animals' Lovely Fur And Forgive Their Claws And Fangs. He'd Never Seen Anything In A Cat's Face But Simpering Incuriosity And Self-interest; You Only Had To Tease One With A Mouse-toy To See Where It's True Heart Lay...cats Were All About Using People

I Hate That Word Dysfunction.

Use Well Thy Freedom.

Everything He'd Done With Regard To Her In The Last Three Years Had Been Calculated To Foreclose The Intensely Personal Sort Of Talks They'd Had When He Was Younger: To Get Her To Shut Up, To Train Her To Contain Herself, To Make Her Stop Pestering Him With Her Overfull Heart And Her Uncensored Self. And Now That The Training Was Complete And She Was Obediently Trivial With Him, He Felt Bereft Of Her And Wanted To Undo It.

You Encountered A Misery Near The End Of The Day And It Took A While To Gauge Its Full Extent. Some Miseries Had Sharp Curvature And Could Be Negotiated Readily. Others Had Almost No Curvature And You Knew You'd Be Spending Hours Turning The Corner. Great Whopping-big Planet-sized Miseries.