Here is my first note. I’ll be using this more and more as I try to wean myself from so much Facebook posting. To christen it and to conflate it with the recent National Pet Day, here is a photo of Archie the first day he began to live with me at my place in NYC. He died in my arms 14 years later at my place in SF. He herded me toward recovery and deeper sense of home there; one of the things I am most grateful for in my whole life is that the last five years of his life he never saw me high again. When he and later little brother Teddy both had died - that’s them in our garden atop Telegraph Hill in a kind of halcyon time in our lives - I decided to try being a cat person when I moved to Hudson, NY, where Teddy died. I began to foster Finn who was already a grown cat but I sensed he needed a little sibling too. I think it is arrogant of humans to think we are enough for our animal companions and, if we can swing it, they need another animal one as well. So one Christmas Eve I adopted Matty and this was what I woke to on Christmas morning. When I began my life as a pilgrim after selling or donating almost everything I owned, I had to find Finn and Matty a new home - I refused to separate them - and they are now living with a remarkable loving man named John in upstage New York. I write this sitting in a cafe in Paris looking at these photos and realizing that loving our animal companions often teaches us about loss either with their own shorter lives or when our own lives change and we have to break our own hearts by finding them a loving home and realizing we were serving as a conduit to save their lives from a shelter, find them a new human companion, and lovingly move on. Herding us toward our deeper, truer home sometimes becomes herding them toward theirs. So here is to Archie and Teddy and Finn and Matty. And the home they all taught me to carry within myself where is some way they all still live. I wanted to make note of that. Onward.