A dog cannot clear its throat, exactly. What Kitty, our little 15-year-old Shichon, does each morning is appear at my bedside about 6 a.m. and emit a low grumbling sound. My cue to get up, get dressed, pop in ear buds and take her for a walk.
Center Avenue is empty at that hour. Tree lined, nice houses. You’d think the pleasant vista of leafy suburban comfort, set to my favorite tunes, would put me in maximum good spirits.
And it does, to the degree that anything can. Yet, after we return home, the first thing I do is fill her water bowl to the brim, thinking “I want her to have plenty to drink in case we drop dead and nobody notices for days.”
A grim thought. And a rather improbable one — I mean, yes, people our age, the mid-60s, do die abruptly. But the odds of both my wife and I expiring at the same moment are slim. How would that even happen? An awful coincidence perhaps. She steps in front of some idiot on an electric scooter blasting down a Loop sidewalk at the same moment I stumble headlong down the stairs at home.
Morbid stuff. Where did that dog-dying-neglected thought even come from? I’d like to blame Gene Hackman — he and his wife died in February, unnoticed for over a week, and one of their dogs perished in a crate, horribly. But I was having this thought long before.
Looking for relief, I wondered if there might nor be some internet gizmo that will sound the alarm if you don’t check in.
“Snug Safety” is a cheerful, well-designed little app that sends a text every day at a set time with a big green button to tap. Fail to tap, and it alerts an emergency contact. Hit the button, and you’re rewarded with an affirmative little quote.
You can pay — $199.99 for a year, $19.99 for a month — for access to a human dispatcher. But the basic service is free.
Every day, a big green button. Then the quote. First day:
“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.”— Herman Melville
Hmm. That doesn’t sound like the author of Moby-Dick. Because it’s not. It’s Rev. Henry Melvill. Different person entirely.
Well, to write is to err. Lapses occasionally occur. The next day, the big green button, and the Pavlovian reward of a handful of quote kibble:
“Love all, trust a few, do no wrong to none.” — William Shakespeare.
Again hmm. “Do no wrong to none?” The bard is not known for his double negatives.
All’s Well that Ends Well, Act I, Scene I, the Countess: “Love all, trust a few/Do wrong to none.”
“Do wrong to none.” Not “Do no wrong to none.” A small but telling difference. Here I’m placing my life and — more significantly, my dog’s life — in their hands, and they can’t even smell rotten Shakespeare? C’mon guys.
Third day: “Truth is worth the risk.” by Ron H. It is? Often I say something exactly the opposite: “Save candor for people you respect.” Truth is frequently NOT worth the risk. And who’s Ron H.? What is this, an AA meeting?
Monday we got, “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being,” attributed to “Johann W. Van Goethe.
Mangling both the quote and the author’s name. It’s “von Goethe.” Space doesn’t allow me to go over the 230 years of the Telephone Game that led from the original German passage in “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprentice” to the squirt of watered-down pap that Snug Safety serves up.
Where do these mangled aphorisms come from?
“Our community submits quotes,” said Preet Anand, the Lyft executive who cofounded Snug in 2019. “We review them for tone and appropriateness, and then update the list every few months! You’re welcome to add a few favorites yourself.”
I believe I will. We may be old, we may be frightened, but we’re not stupid. How about quotes that are both accurate and challenging? “Old men ought to be explorers,” T.S. Eliot writes in “East Coker.” “Here or there does not matter.”
If we’re mining Shakespeare, I’d prefer, “The whirligig of time brings in his revenges.” Or “I wasted time and now time doth waste me.”
If we must grow old and fearful that we may die and nobody will notice, bringing woe to our beloved pets, unless an app tugs at someone’s sleeve, the very least we can ask for are a few meaningful words to chew on in the long hours of worried solitude waiting for that inevitability.
