[Dailydrool] For those who remember Miss Angela Basset

[Elizabeth]

I’ve come across Bill Jenkin’s 2018 Christmas letter, which got misplaced, that reports the death of his employer, Miss Angela Basset. He wrote:

The biggest change in my life this year was the passing in January of Miss Angela Basset, my friend and companion for the last 14+ years (approximately 7 times as long as I was married). She just got old. She left a big hold in my life since she was pretty much in charge of it. No plans as of this writing to replace her.

In an April 2018 letter (found with the lost Christmas letter) he wrote:

It has been a rough winter, mostly trying to get over Angela’s passing and used to living alone again. Angie hit the rainbow bridge on January 29 (which also happens to be Kansas Day) after a very short illness. She was restless on the 27th, not seeming to find the right place to curl up. Her efforts to hop up on the couch, which had been a fifty fifty chance for a couple of weeks, had become total failures. I had a ramp built for her a couple of years ago but she would only use it to dismount, never to go up. She went out into the cold and curled up for several hours at a time, but came back in. The next day she spent most of the day outside and I knew that she was trying to die. . . . [On the 29th] my neighbor and I rolled her into her bed and put it into my car. Off to the vet. He examined her and agreed that her time had come so we said goodbyes and he administered the drug. She was gone in 20 seconds.

It was typical Angela. She couldn’t do it the easy way, she had to do it the $193 way. That includes cremation. Now her shrine rules over my dining room. A friend had given us a cookie jar in the shape of a basset hound. Now it holds ashes. It is sitting atop a book. I thought Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes would be an appropriate base. She is surrounded by a rather unkempt philodendron’s tendrils.

Now I’m trying to adjust to life after Angela. I can decide for myself when to get up and when to go to bed and that has been a nice change. . . . Now, I sleep late, breakfast about nine, have a large and late lunch around 2 and just nibble the rest of the day.

Also, I can use the whole couch now instead of being relegated to one end. I miss her cuddling her butt up against me while I watch TV but she was getting so gassy in her old age that it was a mixed blessing. The girls who comes in semi weekly to clean has noticed a real change. She has to empty the vacuum cleaner canister only twice instead of 5 or 6 times. I had the carpet cleaners in so the house has much less pungency, especially in damp weather and the furnace filter lasts twice as long.

If you correspond with any of the old Drooler, let them know that the Dowager Diva has crossed over but her friend and employee is fine. 


And this is Elizabeth again:

I think there are far more people on the Drool who remember Miss Angela than I’m in direct communication with, so I thought I’d reach more of them this way. As Bill wrote about her, Miss Angela was a force to be reckoned with, a basset with a strong personality who brooked no argument when she wanted to do something. I’ve lived with two of those myself, our late Elsinore and the late Macy, who belonged to a friend. They were bassets of the same generation as Miss Angela. I'm positive they’re with all the other strong-willed female bassets at the Bridge, doing their best to keep everyone else there in line and on schedule as they see fit. 

I’m sad to see the last of this generation pass away, but the generations succeeding them are just as silly, exasperating, bossy, and sweet, and I continue to enjoy getting to know them through their humans’ words on the listserv.

Elizabeth, with young Charlie who, chronologically, is a remnant of Miss Angela’s generation