Muggsy's Brain

On Sunday night the George Maurer Trio had another gig at Crossings Gallery & Gift Shop in Zumbrota, MN. We love it there, it's part concert space, part classroom, part art space, part cool stuff store, all housed inside one of the (former) libraries that Andrew Carnegie built between 1883 and 1929. The Zumbrota Carnegie Library was built in 1906 and has the distinction of being the smallest of them all. Each time we play there we see a lot of the same faces, and some new ones, too. The audiences are enthusiastic and surprisingly not jaded, when you look at some of the other acts who have performed there: Prudence Johnson , John Gorka , Dean Magraw , Michael Johnson and others. Marie, the owner, used to have a part Chow Chow named Biscuit who would roam the audience during performances, and maybe even make her way to the stage now and again. Biscuit died not too long ago and has been replaced by Odie, an old yellow lab mix that she got from an animal rescue group. Odie...

I found my poor little sweet poot today. She's dead. I knew she'd been sick lately, she'd lost so much weight and gotten that ratty, sick cat fur. I knew she was going and the vet would only cost me money I don't really have. I can't spend hundreds of dollars keeping a cat alive like my sister could. I saw her the other night and she was so weak and wobbly. I told her how much I loved her and what a great cat she'd been. I told her it was okay to die. I watched her not much later gingerly walk to one of her favorite living room spaces, under the end table -- she would sleep there for hours. And that's where I found her. She was such a sweet, sweet girl. I keep thinking about our lives together. My girlfriend at the time, Christy, brought home a stray cat one night that turned out to be a pregnant female, Callie was one of five kittens who were born a couple of weeks later. We kept them in the back room of our apartment, a three-season porch that you ...