What Kitten?
I have a save the world issue.
Last Halloween my trick-or-treat had four legs, fur, looked starved and came to the door of my classroom carried by the After School Director looking for a someone just like me, a completely gullible, ready-to-order kitty rescue service. So we got Juliet, nearly starved, dehydrated, a striped neurotic, and a definitely damaged older kitten. She had clearly been traumatized by whatever South Oxnard had to offer before we took her in. I drove her home frantically at lunch fearing what any more cat care would do for her; kids in a school in South Oxnard can be pretty overwhelming when they both pet and kind of demonically hold a frightened animal they find. It’s a great way to learn about childhood, unless, of course, you happen to be a cat. Mainly, I took her home because there seemed no decent alternative. My children were thrilled; my husband, Jack, though unable to fully articulate his feelings, gave away his reception though the gasping, corded neck vein, and the term “Cat” employed to speak of her. “Is that ‘Cat’ going to go back?” “Just where do you plan to keep that ‘Cat?’” “I just don’t like cats, Sarah.” Just jolly good fun home times for the person who finds a starving kitten hard to toss to the ‘hood. I call this getting put in the pet grinder—can’t even enjoy the new, clearly neurotic cat, plus getting the disapproval of the spouse, and also getting to change the litter box while scratching fleas you have to deny exist while hauling around and hiding a Raid can. Now that is some trick of a Halloween. Yet again the universe got me.
In all, I’ve “saved” a parakeet that died the next day, a turtle, two cats, a rabbit, two or three fish, two hamsters, bees and a rat. None of the efforts worked out exactly as I planned. Definitely it calls for a new definition for “saved” if I continue to employ it regarding my contacts with animals. Does it help I mean well?
Now the bees I truly, truly saved. Sophia, my daughter, and Luca, my son, spotted the bees swarming by the window of our house while we were advertising it for sale. This seemed a sure turn-off for the viewing Open House the next day and actually at first it hit me as darn dangerous. The bees swarmed into the bushes in the cul-de-sac, and Jack and the neighbors found a second bunch in a small tree across the street. They were discussing torching them, among other unsavory things, when I got out the phone book and found “Cathy’s Bees”. Cathy, it turned out, is a nurse, who both rescued and kept bees up in Ojai. In an hour or two, she was there, and, as the kids looked on in horror (from safely inside the house), I helped her smoke the bees into a little wooden beehive, and collect the beautiful ball of bees without one sting. I got to hold the ball all around my hand, once they were smoked. It was very cool. I took pictures, while Jack reiterated, “You are such a maniac,” several times throughout the rescue mission. We learned a lot about bees and bee products from Cathy during the mission, including a nifty wellness program where stings bring you better health—perhaps I should look into it, considering the state of my health. She told me these were honeybees that were splitting off with the birth of a new queen to form a new hive, and that she would use them in the production of her honey. Some might say that the bees weren’t with us long enough to be considered a pet, for me they were an ownership triumph. That was one rescue attempt that turned out a success, even if the move was a disaster.
The turtle was all Michael Pennington’s doing. A sweet-hearted 6th grade student I taught 12 years ago, Michael missed several weeks in May, causing general concern. Finally, we called and learned that he had been severely injured in a wreck in Las Vegas with his grandparents. Some level of brain injury had occurred. How this turned into a turtle in my care is interesting. On the last day of school he came to visit me, a scar on his forehead—actually clear around his head. I was shocked to see how hurt and clearly shaky he was. It took a great deal for him to come in to visit, but the family knew how upset we were. Michael was carrying a small-outlawed turtle for me, a Red Slider in a tiny cute cage. It reminded me of when I was young and we got things like this at Murphy Mart in West Virginia. I think pet buying is a little bit more regulated now. In those days you could get quite a few things and we once got ducks there colored Easter colors. He said this Slider came from markets down in LA. You couldn’t turn down something given under those circumstances, so home it went. We kept it three years. In three years I never saw it eat, and I think it actually shrank. So it was about the size of a quarter. I dropped it a few times cleaning its Tupperware cage. This truly was the hardiest animal ever created. We all tried to coax it to eat, in vain; my brother visited and tried to coax it to eat with tuna for hours. It just seemed to exist on air. I took it to school to be the class pet the first year I taught first grade. By then I had the cockatiel and things seemed crowded in the house. A little girl, Sara, who loved visiting my room and whose mom was the school secretary, convinced me she liked the turtle, always wanted a turtle, needed this turtle and finally the clincher: her mom said yes. So off it went. I visited the turtle that Christmas about two months later. It was bigger than my hand and ate goldfish live; my daughters and I watched it devour three. It was not only eating, it was now living in the most beautiful, clean water aquarium with plans for an outdoor pond in the works. Clearly turtles are not my thing. When we went to Warner years later, up in the San Diego Mountains, we had our second close encounter with reptile ownership, another incompetent savior experience again. I saw a huge turtle on the road, bigger than a spare tire, with severe gouges in its shell because cars had hit it that morning up in the middle of nowhere. I forcibly made Jack stop the car and he flatly refused to put it in the back of the Honda. It was absolutely huge and beyond my ability to hoist up by myself though I gave it a good try several times. I knew somehow it needed to be saved. Jack kept on and on with how it was a part of those mountains and nature. Later that day I learned the next person down the road, a mom at the school, did rescue it; it had been dumped up in the mountains, was from a completely different river based habitat, and was finally that day after many frantic calls taken in by San Diego Reptile Rescue. I like turtles, just don’t necessarily know what to do with them. I had carried that huge thing off the road, with Jack cursing at me all the while—at least 150 pounds--- while he is giving me the old song and dance about getting to work on time and my insane behavior and biting. I still regret not just throwing it in the car in my seat; thank goodness the next car did gather it up. It was a beauty. So was my Red Slider when it got an owner that could feed it. Two years after she took it in, Sara had a fearfully long bout of salmonella—Red Sliders are outlawed for that reason—but the Health Department returned the turtle after holding it two months saying it was “in the clear”, they absolutely were sure it did not infect her but I kind of think they were wrong. I kind of still feel a little worry about all of that.
The hamsters spanned a rather long period of our life, really there were three, if you count the one Jack “took care of”. Sophia wanted a Teddy Bear hamster like her friend Jill had so when she was 8 for her birthday, and $125 all told, we got this for her at PetCo. It seems like yesterday I was driving over thinking all kinds of private thoughts (like “Jack will kill me”) while selecting the thing and getting it’s deluxe cage with accessories. It wasn’t strictly a savior story though, Jill’s Mom donated all Jill’s hamster’s feed and cage crunchies, after Jill’s hamster failed to survive. She’s a teacher, Jill’s mom, and I think that hamster was a class pet. I recalled to her a story of how Jack ten years before unbeknownst to me agreed to keep a hamster for a teacher friend. On finding it dead in our garage Jack spilled the story he was going to watch it and didn’t realize they were sensitive to zero temperatures. That was a really awful Christmas. But I digress. Anyway Sophia got her darling chubby hamster she named Marshmallow and it grew and grew. Her new friend, Xuliema, after we moved, let her little sister Chantel accidentally and tragically squeeze it to death and so we got the second replacement hamster after the worst funeral I’ve ever attended with a box and hole on the side of the house. Jack was funeral director. Luca wrote “Marshmallow The Dead Hamster” on the side of the box. It had music, as I recall. Our attempt at relieving her pain was called “Sunflower”. Sophia never really bought into the idea of replacements and her affection for biting, less sweet Sunflower was less than for her sweetheart cute Marshmallow. He was a rather different nature. Not that she didn’t try, or that we didn’t give it our all. Many a time we tried to figure out how to socialize Sunflower and make him happier and Sophia liked to let it out to have a little run now and again. We moved during the healing and one day Jack, while some health issue distracted me, decided to be helpful and take Sunflower to his school. He’s Superintendent and he escorted the hamster in to be Luca’s new class pet. It was over before I had time to comment. Taken home at Spring break by another class member Luca was told a cousin squeezed it to its death. He was truly traumatized by that, but not so much as given a shoulder to cry on at school that day by father or teacher, as he grew ill and ended up with the flu and this all spilled out to us at home when we were unraveling why he was behaving like nothing I recognized as a child, more like Christmas vacation mush..Two deaths by squeezing it just too much for one family.
The parakeet was found on the school front lawn, small and obviously manhandled by at least 300 kids and a cat I suspect, prior to my deciding to take it home. I dutifully went to PetCo, bought a cage, seed, perch, water container, the works, plus the trip that day to the vet. Spent $175 I did not have. It died in the morning. I can still hear Jack announcing, “It’s dead, Sarah.” My kids were so horrified that we went immediately out to a bird store trying to find another cute green (read “identical”) parakeet and ended up with “The Bird”, an angry grumpy cockatiel I’m sure was just sitting in his cell waiting to be transferred to a new facility, tricked into this by a crafty pet store owner. The Bird never liked us, but after nine years he was paroled over to a neighbor who not only wanted him, but his cage, the two parakeet friends that had joined him, and the two lovebirds that had likewise become part of the family. We were moving again, and it seemed wiser to leave them all in the care of someone who built hutches and knew how to take them out on your finger. I was hard pressed at cage cleaning time to even reach my arm in with the food without risk of life and limb. My husband said very little about the birds aside from commenting every morning as they screeched their hellos that something had to be “done”.
Sylvia got the fish at a carnival as her prize in a plastic bag, which had to be driven home from Greenfield to Marina, a 50-mile distance, before they hit a bowl. Most parents would have been satisfied to allow the fish to die that night. But I went out the next day and purchased a $90 Little Mermaid aquarium for her at the local K-Mart. The fish, there were three of them, were common goldfish; and one went belly-up about a week later, and that’s when we learned that Sylvia was very sensitive to things dying. So it sort of became important to keep the rest of the fish alive. The tank was in her room, and she kept good care of her fish friends. They had names, at least, and she liked to watch them swim. When we moved, I was eight months pregnant, and I had been in the hospital with complications. Jack had to be in his job so he left moving to me and my 74 year old mom. After the movers finished, here read “ex-cons”, I had to drive the van six hours away to our new home in Oxnard. One thing, of course, no one had thought of, least of all Jack, was the fish. So, since the aquarium was too heavy for me to hoist in the car, I got the bright idea of releasing the fish to the nearby duck pond. I had seen fish there—it would be a natural fish habitat. Maybe the fish would even be happier there, free of glass walls and little plastic mermaids. So Sylvia released the fish nicely into the duck pond and turned around, and instantaneously a seagull swooped down and ate them. I blinked. So much for setting the fish free. Sylvia did not see this and if my Mom could keep her mouth shut would not know today that her fish joined the great circle of life.
Now the rat was foisted upon me, so it really wasn’t really a rescue mission so much as a getting screwed kind of thing. It was sent in to class one morning from a mom suing the school over her son’s disabilities way back when I worked in northern CA, and I kind of put it way down in the hierocracy of pet ownership and altruistic rescue. She sent it in and insisted it remain as the new class pet. At the time I wasn’t crossing her. Since it bit several kids in its first week and the child who’d owned it before was terrified of it, it wasn’t hard to see where this one was going. I knew room 12 up in the Junior High had a snake and our class decided in a nearly unanimous vote to send him up for a circle of life event. The rat became its next dinner. Jack happily assisted in the transfer. Another cage deserted. The mom, as I recall, asked for it back after her legal actions escalated and things were not so sweet later in the year.
The rabbit came that year, too. It was a fluffy white fellow; on its third owner, another half-baked class pet idea but this one was a really wonderful pet. I liked him, kids loved him, he was trained and good as gold. In three months we moved down south and he had become the white rabbit of the preschool, so I left him where he obviously fit in. In all, that pet spent about a week in my care. He was some rabbit—got him cages, bottles, pellets. Jack didn’t say too much about it either, as he was the one to arrange its visit over to the pre-K.
The kitties I had didn’t all fare so well. One was a beautiful black and white Persian. Happy cat, Sylvia called her. Aptly named, she made us happy, but our crotchety old neighbor Howard was less than charmed. In any case, Happy and her kittens were killed in the backyard by a possum. Jack was sent out with a hoe, and he chopped the possum up. I can always recall seeing him swing that hoe. He came in from our version of the Chucky movies asking me, “What have you made me do?” Our neighbor’s fits over the kitties, prior to their horrific ends, eventually prompted me to get on the bandwagon to move. Howard got old.
And now we have Juliet. She found Romeo, of course, living across the street and gave us a set of five—five—kittens right as I came home from tumor surgery. We’ve had her a long time, a year. I thought this was pretty cool, a whole year with our cat. Jack has been this year evidentially silently raging over fleas…. we had a few pop up here and there on his leg, his arm, and his back. So while we got excited about the new additions, Daddy was steaming in the garage, thinking his thoughts. Jack is just not a pet person. When confronted with this, he tells the story of a snake he found and let die in his garage as a kid to prove otherwise. No, he responds, he released it to the creek where he found it. I always heard it died and stunk up the garage. So he says he had some creek animals as pets to offset accusations of pet distain, and makes claim to owning a roommate’s dog in college, who he remarks revealingly was “Stupid.” It was clearly a close relationship. He is not a “pet person” and his Mom was ten times removed from that designation. Joan believed in a complete separation of pet and state. Seeing a hamster in our home, another brave try at having animals for the kids, she commented that I should have it removed immediately as a rodent. Not really the best way to warm up to the grandkids, and certainly a good way to cause a little Freudian scale issue. “Sorry kids, mom decided to fry the hamster.” So, Jack just doesn’t get petting the fur or saying, “How sweet,” or any of the pet thing. His usual comment, “Get a farm if you want animals.” Frankly, I expected him to toss Juliet out in a week, definitely within a month. When she had her kittens I thought, “This is it, he’s going to blow fur from here to Columbia”. Still, things seemed to work. He ignored their existence and the kids and I lead a secret kitten life. We had five, GreyPaws, OrangeSpot, The Buddha, Orange, and Blacks. We are simply good with names that express the inner being of kittens. Slowly these kittens grew, and as I recovered from surgery they really helped to divert my attention. Everyone, save the one who would not see them, loved to watch them play. One day the boys across the street came and took two over—the boy kitties. I had to accept that but we cried. Sylvia says it was kind of a wasted cry as they are back over visiting at nights, clubbing, but we cried for their going. Then Jack woke up and began to nag about homes for the cats, giving them away, impossible amounts of cats being born. He can see cats from here to there, cats from sea to sea, cats everywhere. I kind of played along with this while encouraging him to go on out and work on his projects in the garage. That way we could visit with the kittens in peace.
I had my second surgery three weeks ago, it was a horrible surprise in just three months needing to have a second run at it, but I guess Jack was used to tumors because the heat was on now. No more pity. Cat’s gotta go. It’s a bit tough to hunt kitty homes a week after abdominal surgery, especially when you like your kitties. So I kind of tried to ignore him, and he was hitting the high notes, after all he had ignored us, ignoring him, over the previous weeks, so I figured he’d go back to living in denial, I hoped for awhile, to give me time to look. Why Jack chose to focus when he did on this I’ll never know. Suddenly “Those cats gotta go,” became his personal theme song. And I really do respect that.
Then a possum appeared in the yard a week or so ago and we all lost it. The Terminator, for us, is a possum, not that lousy actor Schwarzenegger, though I can kind of see possum in his moves. We were possessed by fear of a possum. We ran around pulling the kitties in and freaking out. Two days later, I wanted to go see my daughter in an all day band competition—quite an undertaking after this surgery. But now a kitten was missing and we spent all morning in bushes, behind trees, up and down the street, calling and looking. That night when I got home I was looking and finally getting ready to really freak out when Sylvia offers that Dad took Orange Spot to a new owner that morning. He got up at 7AM while I slept, crated a cat in a box and drove it away. I went out in the garage where he was lurking to ask him and he informed me of a plethora of faults I have including wanting to make this family, “ never be able to survive.” Ruin by kittens. After he admitted to this cat removal, and to saying nothing while watching my mom and I search for the cat I was dumbfounded. He was actually pointedly directing his inane comments on my behaviors as a pet rescuer. I simply see him now in a new light.
He’s never going to be in charge of the baby, that’s for damn sure.
Orange Spot has a new home in Camarillo now with another teacher. One that is rumored to have a savior complex. One who looked at her boss, my husband, and decided that taking a cat might be saving a cat. Somehow the kitty survived the move better than I did. I’m trying to recover the pieces of myself lost to all these animal comings and goings. One word I still need to learn to employ occasionally remains, “No,” and perhaps then too, “No pets allowed.” But then I still long for that Maltese puppy I now know lives in Riverside.
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