Now that voters in the United States have politically buried their Fake President, Donald Trump, at the polls by a wide margin, we can all continue popping the corks off those celebratory bottles of champagne into the new year and finally close the book on that unfortunate reign of America’s self-appointed emperor…right?

Think again. As this blog post goes to press, the U.S. congressional runoff races in the state of Georgia are winding down, the U.S. Congress is preparing to officially certify the electoral votes by winning candidate Joe Biden, and Trump is cheerleading a mass demonstration of his right-wing extremist followers in Washington DC that promises to be violent. And if that weren’t enough, several former U.S. secretaries of defense, both Republicans and Democrats, have become concerned enough to issue a rare statement blasting Trump’s insistence on stealing an otherwise free and fair election.

Do animals have spirits?

If you had asked me such a question some years ago, I probably would have given you some theoretical answer based on things I have read in books or seen in movies or gotten from the Web. But the issue became a very real and personal one for me a year ago, with the passing of our family’s dog, as I wrote about in this blog space.

My wife was haranguing me to get to the dinner table; we were already running late. “Wait a minute,” I said from the entryway by our front door. “I think she’s going.” I didn’t want to come back after dinner only to find that a beloved member of our family had already left. My instinct told me to stay with our dog. It was a very good thing I did.

It was yesterday evening, Monday, and our 15-year-old golden retriever, Marron (Spanish for "brown"), seemed to be hyperventilating as she lay helplessly on her side on a blanket just inside the front door of our home. We’d had an emergency house-call visit from a doctor of a nearby animal hospital earlier in the day — the second such visit in the past few days.