November disappeared in a blur. Jenn and I spent Halloween night — her favorite holiday — stranded in a traffic lane on a dark road when her Saturn just up and died. We didn’t even have enough juice to power our hazard flashers, so each car going by made us cringe as we braced for impact. Turned out to be a bad battery, which Saturn — “A different kind of car company” — typically denied all responsibility for.

Jenn was out of town the next week, training for her new job, while I worked tons of overtime on an out-of-control project which kept me in the office til the wee hours several nights.

When she came back, we attended a family reunion of my mother’s distant relatives. I was supposed to invite the immediate fam back to my house to see our place, but — not having had a chance to make the place look like anything other than a pigsty bachelor pad — I disappointed them all by un-inviting them. My mother is still pissed at me about that.

The next week, amidst the despair engendered by the horrible election results, my neglected teeth decided to call for attention. The low-level throbbing pain grew into a major seismic event which sent me rushing to an unknown dentist who wrestled the tooth out of my head, his foot propped on my chest for leverage. The next couple of days went by in a codeine haze.

Jenn went away again for some more training and I realized what a pathetic loser I am without her as I moped around, unable to motivate myself to do anything other than crossword puzzles and mah jongg games.

When she came back, we noticed Claudio, Jenn’s favorite orange male tiger cat, was acting a little strange, hiding instead of being his usual social self. On Monday morning, I witnessed him making a spastic attempt at walking, limbs stiff and uncoordinated, until he fell over and was unable to stand for a couple of moments. I took him to the local vet, who determined that he had some calcification in his left kidney as well as an enormously elevated white-cell count and might benefit from having the kidney removed. Jenn took him for an ultrasound to determine if the other kidney was okay, but that doctor found that not only was the other kidney bad, too, but there was evidence of several massive lymphomas in his intestinal tract. We took Claudio home, held him, cuddled him, then brought him to the vet for euthanasia. He didn’t go gently, taking a double dose of sedative to put him under, before the final shot which stopped his heart. While Jenn cried uncontrollably, I buried him in the backyard near our our other dead cat, Cordelia.

Thanksgiving was a little hollow. My relatives — no cat owners among them — tried to sympathize, but you could tell many of them were thinking, “Get over it!” We drove up to New Jersey to my cousin’s house for dinner, since my parents were closing up their New York home for the trip to Florida to their winter home. It was a nice holiday meal — they made a Tofurkey for me and Jenn — but it was the first we’ve had in the house of one of my generation. A torch-passing kind of thing, with all its attendant melancholy.

So, I’m glad that month is over… Here’s hoping this one’s better.