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Rescuing Pumpkins
Like, I'd never liked cats, anyway.
Scratch that, I'd hated cats.
As a young boy I'd chase them around the neighbourhood, trying to set them on fire. Of course, my parents didn't smoke, nor did they leave matches lying around the apartment for easy grabbing by a seven year old boy. So I chased the cat around whilst cracking two rocks together, hoping to get a happy conjunction of sparking rocks and cat fur. I imagined this great big fireball one of those days that would just take off — roaring across the street, over the stone wall at the very end of the road and into the forest, where it would join the rest of its cat brethren, smoking away in the soggy darkness. This, as you might imagine, made me look, well, 'special', was how a few of the other people in the neighbourhood put it. Which made me hate cats even more.
In my first year in the book store, I attempted to own a dog.
It didn't go particularly well, and, to be honest with you, I think dogs in the city are just a bad idea. Unless you get one of those tiny dogs, the sort you can yank on their leash and *phloop!* up they come, off the ground and out of harm's way, just like that. Unless the leash squirts off their neck and they bash off the ceiling. In which case, *phloosh!* right into harm's way. They're small, self-contained, easy to just tuck under your arm when you're in a hurry and you know that you need to take the thing outside or you're going to be wasting a lot of time in the morning cleaning up after the mess they could have left outside. Bigger dogs you can't really hurry, it just doesn't work like that. They want to trundle around and bump into things and sniff things. Which isn't a city sort of thing. Or at least the way I inhabit in the city.
So I had this great big lab retriever/something else mutt, and it was gorgeous. Unfortunately, it also had a lot of energy.
So, after a disastrous week of the two of us cohabiting, I had to break it off. He'd peed on pretty much every surface there was to pee on, chewed on a corner of my Powerbook (instead of the rawhide chew things that looked, even to me, eminently chewable), and he woke me up almost every night that week to go for a walk at or around 3 AM. Now, I know she complained about my itinerant snoring keeping her awake, and I've even woken myself up a couple of times, so I feel qualified to say that it was never any where near as bad as being woken by a dog who really needed to get outside.
In the end, my sister, who was living out in the countryside, doing real estate-y sort of things, she took the dog. Whom I'd named, ehm, 'Dog.' I need my characters provided in books, I just got a major brain block, sitting there, the first day back from the pound with this big black and brown mutt sitting there on the shop floor, facing the couch. It was probably the most serene moment we had together.
So off to my sister, who was more than happy to take a dog in. And I went back to my solitary ways.
The little dogs weren't even an option. They're almost as bad as cats, they're so tiny and helpless and annoying.
So, cats.
But here she was, threatening to bring a cat into our happy solitude, our happy home.
Now, I think it was an exercise in how we handled shared responsibility. Like the sort of thing you might have had to do in school, where you carried an egg around for a week, just to show you how much responsibility is involved in caring for something twenty four hours a day. Of course, a lot of people just left the egg on a shelf somewhere before going out to kick a ball around or something. We were kids, after all, twelve or thirteen. The age when you start to learn that if you're given an egg to take care of and it gets broken, no one's going to be too diligent, checking to make sure you've got the exact same egg when you come in to school the next day.
However, I could be wrong about that reading. After all, women are from Venus, right?
I have a horrible confession to make. I may have even read that book shortly after she left. Possibly the same day. Probably while I was drunk.
I don't think it was the original article, but it was full of smarmy, "underground cave dwelling lemurs sometimes forget to throw out the trash, you, as a tree-hugging zebra, you must exhibit great patience, as the cave dwelling lemurs will eventually get it. And if they don't get around to it soon enough for your striped taste, prod them, but gently"; that sort of thing. I may have found it funny, in another time, another place. You know.
In the end, thank God, we didn't have to get a cat. She heard her brother was allergic, while discussing the idea of the cat with her mother one night, and she must have gotten worried she might be allergic as well, which would be a major blow to whatever sort of part in the battle plan the cat might have played. It might have weakened her upper hand on the caring front, should the need come round to have to give up the cat due to her allergies. And so it got dropped.
disclaimer:
This has possibly been one little snippet of the perpetually forthcoming God Coffee, I Miss You.
Maybe.
Who knows?
Oh yeah. I do
Hmmph.
Imagine that.
So. Anyway.
It's getting chilly out here in California, we're thinking about asking for our money back.
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