Best Laid Plans

All my life I've been a planner. At age eight I promised myself I would dive off the high divebefore my ninth birthday--and I did. At sixteen I planned to pass my driver's test the first time--and I did. When the college of my choice accepted me, I determined to show my father I could graduate on the Dean's List--and I did. My post college plans were to marry, produce two children two years apart, get a master's degree, and have a career. All those things happened just as I planned.

     Lately, however, my planning hasn't been working out. Case in point: When my seventeen-year-old cat, Sam, succumbed to gravity last August, my plan was to wait an appropriate mourning period, then return to the Humane Society and adopt two senior cats, young enough to keep each other company but old enough not to outlive me. Then fate intervened.
     It was definitely not my plan for my husband of forty-four years to fall in love with another woman--a secret he managed to keep from me for about two months. When the truth of his affair surfaced, he did the honorable thing and introduced her to me, and in an instant I understood why he was so smitten.
     His inamorata now lives with us--a combination of shihtzu and poodle, which makes her either a Pooshitz or a Shitzpoo, depending on the time of day. We named her "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," a ten-month-old rescue puppy who has now been spayed, inoculated, chipped, clipped, and laundered--not necessarily in that order.
     She has come to us housebroken, presumably by the same person who abandoned her. (The first fills me with gratitude, the second makes me crazy.) Shy at first, Lucy has now assumed responsibility for all furry or feathered critters in our fenced-in backyard.  Everything makes Lucy happy--kibbles, her chew toy, riding in the car, tickle games, and any sentence that includes the word "go."
     As Robert Burns once cautioned, "the best laid schemes 'o mice an' men gang aft agley,"
but in this case, I couldn't be more pleased.