Smokey enjoyed two more seasons with me in the Pines, including one with David and haircut boy, until she grew too feeble to make the trip . . . we did lose her one more time, briefly, when she wandered into the empty disco on our way to the harbor . . . another good story, much more amusing than when she took a dump on the upper deck of the ferry during her final crossing . . . David moved into J's ground floor apartment around the corner from my third floor walk up which made it easy to drop her off there the last summer of her life while i continued going to the beach . . . when Smokey grew increasingly incontinent and started to fall down the stairs, i told David, who recently had been diagnosed with HIV, it's time to put her down . . . he refused and insisted that she move in with him and J . . . i don't know how J put up with it . . . he had lost his longtime lover to AIDS less than a year before he met David and now he had another sick lover and a sick dog to take care of . . . Smokey steadily deteriorated for a month or two . . . when she stopped singing for her supper, even David admitted it was cruel to keep her alive . . . we made an appointment with a local vet . . . the three of us--David and his two J's--held hands while the vet injected Smokey with sodium pentobarbital . . . it usually requires only one injection, said the vet when she continued breathing for what seemed like a long time . . . David and i looked at one another thru wet eyes and smiled . . . it took twice as much poison to kill our dog . . . another good Smokey story, but one that David wouldn't be able to tell very long.