Animal Dreams: Animal Therapy and Terminal Cancer
When I was a small child, I had the gooiest of soft spots for all animal creatures, fictional or otherwise. Every night before bed, my dad would read me a story featuring the little forest and meadow people of Thornton W. Burgess, including Grandfather Frog, Jimmy Skunk, Johnny Chuck, Jerry Muskrat, Paddy the Beaver, and my all-time favorite, the saucy Sammy Jay. (My mom constantly bawled me out for being saucy, but I took that reproach as a compliment.)
I would also watch all the animal shows on tv, which usually featured intrepid or inspirationally caring dogs: Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, and the most heart-rending of all, The Littlest Hobo. Whenever a dog was lost, miserable, or perished in a show or movie, I would blubber uncontrollably for hours.
In grade three, I finally got my first pet, to whom I gave the splendidly original name of Frisky. A girl in my class, Janine Adams, announced in show and tell that she had kittens to give away and immediately became a popular sensation, even though she had been shunned for having cooties during the entire grade two year. I absolutely had to have one of those furry bundles! I hectored my parents mercilessly until they relented, with the proviso that it would be my job to deal with the litter box and dole out the cat food, tasks that I carried out with no little amount of gagging.
I so loved that pretty tortoise-shelled cat! My parents graciously allowed her to claw their sofa and armchair to shreds and she woke up the entire family during many a night when she fought screaming skirmishes with other felines or became a yowling predator pursuing backyard rodents or birds. (She would even proudly bring home various gory trophies, which we hastily buried without last rights or sacraments.) Listening to those cat fights, I suffered endless anguish, but Frisky usually emerged unscathed or at worst with some minor ruffled tufts.
My precious cat was crushed by a car when I was in ninth grade, and I felt that my life was over. I howled day and night.
My own children have always loved animals. When it comes to beasts, the three guys in our little family are sentimental North Americans, whereas in the pet department my wife Anne has mainly been a tough-as-nails rural Eastern European through and through. In her Slovak homeland, animals were either raised to be devoured (there was no use getting too attached to a warm and fuzzy rabbit) or in the case of the typically vicious local canines served to guard the home fort against predators or intruders. (The first phrase that I learned in visiting her village was Pozor pes…Beware of dog…pes was often protecting the backyard geese or chickens.)
But even Anne had her conversion to cats, first when she returned to North America in 1977 after roaming the South American Trail for six months, after which she acquired a tortoise shell cat and named him Poncho. (Poncho too was no match for a sturdy vehicle, suffering an agonizing death on Anne’s street in Old Quebec.)
And today, during her battle with cancer, Anne adores interacting with her fur grandchildren Mimi and Sassy, with whom she has established a near purr-fect relationship.
Meanwhile, as adults, both of our sons have maintained their remarkable and touching love for animals – even dogs on the part of our younger son, who is smitten by a Pomeranian named Anchovy – fostered in part, I would like to think, by their having been read the same bedtime stories that I so loved as a kid. Thoroughly disillusioned by human perfidy, they seek solace in kindred creatures, first encountered among the little forest and meadow people, who continue to elicit their kind and caring inner beings.
And here’s a little cat story from our time in Dijon, France:
Nous sommes désolés Oncle Albert / We’re so sorry Uncle Albert – Robert McBryde
Your friend,
Robert
https://robertmcbrydeauthor.com/
