Transcribed by

Patty Murphy Luzzi

Happy Luzzi here to wish you a healthy and prosperous New Year. I’m the (handsome) beagle who lives with the Luzzi family. I’m officially an old dog now. I got my AARF card. I spend my days sleeping, and occasionally checking the stock market. I just like to see which one is winning, bears or bulls.

I could have told you a long time ago that a bull is no match for a bear.

The Luzzi dad doesn’t seem to be too happy when the bears are winning on some place called Wall Street. But he says that everything else that’s happened this year helps him keep it in perspective.

I think he’s talking about when everything came to a screeching halt last spring. Instead of planting a garden, the Mom disappeared three times to a hospital. She didn’t cook for a long time, and she couldn’t lift anything. I guess she had surgery on something called the cancer.

The phone rang all the time. I heard her telling people that now she has a semi-colon, and she would laugh before she said “Ouch.”

I remember when the dad had surgery on his cancer when I was just a puppy. He’s fine now, so I knew the mom would be fine, too. And that’s how I know that first you get cancer, then you get perspective.

My boy Joe came back here to live, and he lets me bunk with him. Just after he came home, the brother, John, moved out. John has a nice girlfriend named Trish, and she came over with her family on the day we ate turkey. We all like Trish a lot.

The mom flew to Lake Tahoe when she got better, and a week later the dad drove there to pick her up. They went to a place called Yo-seh-mitty. I heard the mom say that it was spectacular. She even liked driving through Gold Country and finding a town called Murphys. I guess the mom is feeling better now, because she has two jobs, and is gone a lot.

The mom and dad talked to family a lot. I heard them say words like premature grand-baby, detox, counseling, dementia, unemployment, and shingles. But now their conversations have words like grateful, healthy, improved, and sober. I don’t understand, but I guess it’s all a matter of perspective.