With blue vinyl-tile floor, pale-green wainscoating, pink walls, a yellow ceiling, and orange-and-white stork-patterned drapes, the expectant fathers' lounge churned with the negative energy of color overload. It would have served well as the nervous-making set for a nightmare about a children's-show host who led a secret life as an ax murderer. The chain-smoking clown didn't improve the ambience.

No matter how close we are to another person, few human relationships are as free from strife, disagreement, and frustration as is the relationship you have with a good dog. Few human beings give of themselves to another as a dog gives of itself. I also suspect that we cherish dogs because their unblemished souls make us wish - consciously or unconsciously - that we were as innocent as they are, and make us yearn for a place where innocence is universal and where the meanness, the betrayals, and the cruelties of this world are unknown.

A great deal of phenomenal experience has fostered in me a flexibility of the mind and imagination that some might call madness

Home is the first refuge from - and last defense against - the disappointments and the terrors of life.

Then what are you? An electronic Hannibal Lector? You can't eat my liver with fava beans through a modem, you know.

Where there is cake, there is hope. And there is always cake.

Life had not taught me to distrust ministers, but it had taught me to trust no one more than dogs.