He’s on my lap. The round thing at the upper left is my knee. He weighs a ton.

We’re worried. And I feel guilty. He’s been having anxiety attacks. Suddenly starts shaking. The only thing that calms him down is the clarinet and oboe movement of Mozart’s Concerto for Clarinet in A Major. That makes him sleep like a baby. But it’s only seven and a half minutes long.

Doesn’t seem right, does it?

Why I feel guilty. Obviously, Raebert doesn’t know or give a fig about ObamaCare. But I do. He has adopted a one foot rule. Either he’s got his head on me or he’s on the floor below me, not to be rousted or otherwise interfered with. He has no appetite. He has to be tricked into going outside. No one in the deerhound community has ever heard of anything like this. We’ve made an appointment with the vet. Friday.

What to do? You can’t exactly explain that there’s no need for him to worry about ObamaCare since he never knew what it was in the first place. I can’t tell him not to worry about the state of a nation that’s nosediving into the abyss because he doesn’t know what a nation is, or what an abyss is, for that matter.

But he seems to be expressing what I am, in some respects, denying in myself. A debilitating sorrow, a fear that is not personal but somehow universal.

I’d settle for him eating the juiced-up breakfast he has disdained all day — his usual pricey kibble mixed with the soft food we got for our aging greyhound, topped off with an ounce of yoghurt and the dregs of a bag of cheddar Goldfish. Doesn’t that sound heavenly? But he hasn’t even glanced at it.

How can I tell him it’s okay, not his problem to worry about? My wife says I should ask myself the same question. But what do women know? I mean, really.