No sighs but o' my sighing

The animal pictured on my website, a refugee lab rat, about which I wrote here, died a while back. Before that day, though, I had acquired a second rattus norvegicus, from a neuroscientist friend, who had named her Pinky.

Rats only live about two years, though. Pinky died a couple of days ago, and now the pet count around here is zero.

We are a social species, and not too fussy about it. Animal companionship is good for human health. And even though I ``live alone,'' in the sense that no other people live in my apartment, I have always kept animals of one sort or another for more than two decades.

So this creature-absence is deeply strange. There's no explanation for the odd sound in the quiet of the night; no sense that my mood will register with some other mind (even a mind the size of a hazelnut will do); no unconscious certainty that what happens to me here also happens to another being -- that I am plural, not singular. ``No sighs but o' my sighing, no tears but o' my shedding.'' The shock Shylock describes here is not the tears and sighs, but their being unshared, uncontradicted, unregistered. Part of the health benefit of pet animals, I'd bet, is their help in staving off a feeling of being nobody to nobody.