Sorting through our options

Allowing Boss to scratch my tummy, we sort through the final trickle of words he will seek to define for his book project. We are quietly rejecting things that sound too pretentious or academic or both. Boss has been unusually sad and reflective the past few days because, he explained, he had read a short, woeful novel about the last days of one of his favorite composers, MR. An amazing man, Sally, Boss tells me. Gifted beyond measure, cut down by a freak accident when barely in his 60s. I nod in recognition. Sometimes, when Boss plays his music, I can sense what Boss admires about him, the seeming simplicity set forth in an unconventional tonality that suggests MR may have had a dog or two in his life. Dogs do hear things differently. I also see Boss truly reaching out to make this project have much of himself in it, a gift as it were to persons he knew, knows now, and is yet to know. Nice, when you come to think of it.