There may be a chance – albeit hopefully a distant one – that at some point in the future either Blondie or myself will be taken away by kindly attendants in white coats while horrified animal control authorities remove a zoo of cats and dogs from an unspeakable house as neighbors gape in horrified disbelief and the news cameras roll. Unless there has been a mega-spectacular crackup in rush-hour traffic or Teddy Kennedy has been found in bed with a live boy or a dead woman, the resulting story will be about third or fourth down in the evening newscast.
Sigh.
Which is by way of saying that my daughter has brought home another animal! To add to the menagerie! In a very small house! And like a sucker, I said yes! Like a sucker I tried to insist that this one MUST go to the no-kill shelter eventually! Like a sucker, I know that it probably won’t! As soon as it has finished a period of quarantine in the garage, it will join the rest of the happy clan, shredding the furniture, shedding drifts of hair all over the house, fast asleep on anything soft, and it will remain until it pops off of old age!
Or Blondie takes it with her, when she finishes veterinary school and has a place of her own. Jay-sus, she had better qualify as a vet, it’s the only way we’ll ever afford to keep all the furry freeloaders in the manner to which they would like to become accustomed.
This one is named “Meek”. He is a cat, a neutered male, white with a brindle saddle and ears, about three years old. He’s been hanging out at the place in Selma where Blondie works part-time, one of the herd of tame and semi-ferals which she has fed off and on for the last year or so. He’s one of the tamest and the most slavishly devoted to her; she has always thought he was dumped by his previous owner. One of the other tame ones was run over and killed by a car a couple of months ago, and this morning when she left the office to run an errand, Meek ran after her and followed her car almost to the highway. Evidently, he has decided that if he can’t live with Blondie, he doesn’t want to live at all.
Not good survival instincts for an outdoor cat, living adjacent to a highway. The veterinarian pegs him to be about three years old, a real sweetie… and it appears that he has already survived a traumatic event that broke one of his legs and ribs. Hard to say if he was dumped first and then injured… or more horrible to imagine, injured and then dumped.
Sigh. There is a kind of symmetry to it, though. Two dogs, two gimp cats, two grey and two black. I swear on a stack of bibles, though; Weevil, Sam and Meek are Blondie’s critters. And there won’t be any more. Really….