I don't usually sob when I hear "Old Man" by Neil Young, but

today it played on my way home from the emergency vet with Frannie on my lap—a four-hour ordeal of quarantine in a separate windowless cinderblock waiting room reeking of soap almost strong enough for urine and blood—and we were in this particular room because Frannie has contagious kennel cough, which she likely picked up from her new “cousin” Lando, the puppy of my son and his wife, the puppy who looks exactly like one of those irresistible giant stuffed animal prizes at a totally rigged midway game at the fair that you can never win but then, amazement!, you do! , and, anyway, Lando goes to doggie daycare where kennel cough is rampant right now, so Frannie started that honking goose cough on Sunday and it worsened on Monday after Jon’s sinus surgery—listen, if you’ve never had sinus surgery I hope you never do; did you know they can pack something aptly called “packing” inside your nose to soak up the blood (which will still trickle out constantly despite the packing) and they can pack that packing so far up in there you can’t see it, but you sure can feel the pressure from all the swelling and the packing which is unbearable but you must bear it—and on the way home with Frannie and all her medicines and mild food samples, “Old Man” came on Spotify and it was four o’clock, which, in December in Minnesota, means the sun is already kamikazeing to the horizon, and I was driving due west, so the light rays were firing straight into my eyes, a phenomenon that even the visor can’t mitigate—I’m too short—so I was hoisting myself up with my left foot to catch at least a little sliver of visor shade to avoid crashing into something because I honestly could not see a thing, and “Old Man” came on in that blinding light, and there it was—the first sob—which, sure, was partly the cumulative weight of a thousand hours of hospital waiting rooms this week for people and animals, but it was also something else, like how Jon and I saw Neil Young this summer at Farm Aid in Minneapolis with 50,000 other people in an open air stadium where he sang “Old Man” along with a bunch of his other best songs, but not “Harvest Moon,” which hurt, though not as much as it might have because what Neil