Reigning cats…and dogs
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.)
Thornton W. Burgess – Wikipedia
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. (To do this day, I’m always typing in that moniker to answer one of those annoying first-pet questions to open a bank account or procure a new credit card.) 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. After a few days of enduring these unending lachrymose displays, my father came home with a dog. A chihuahua with another highly original name: Tiny. Dad was only trying to help. But I never took to Tiny; she just couldn’t replace my lovely Frisky. So she became my father’s dog, and he devoted the same degree of affection to Tiny as I had to my cat. And he also transformed his “wee faithful beast” into a version of himself: skittish, neurotic, and often angry. Tiny would bark relentlessly at every interloper who dared enter our humble abode and eventually would only eat if seated in my father’s lap under a blanket at the dinner table, quivering and snarling.
Thus did I become a cat person.
Cats certainly get the short shrift when it comes to tv shows and feature films, though not to cartoons or story books. There is no cat equivalent for Lassie or The Littlest Hobo: anthropomorphized felines would be more likely to give the viewer the middle finger.
My own children have always loved animals. When it comes to beasts, the three guys in our little family are sentimental North Americans, whereas my wife Anne is 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.) For Anne’s father, all pets were “durty”; they belonged outdoors, otherwise their hair sullied the house and invaded the soup. Moreover, they dared to leave their droppings on his lawn; he had several dog poop flinging tilts with neighbors in Canada in that regard.
Allergies prevented me from offering our sons cats or dogs. They had to make do with turtles, gerbils, and a bird. The turtle phase was brief but existentially portentous; these slimy little reptiles kicked the proverbial bucket at a rapid clip and normally were flushed down the toilet after brief funeral proceedings accompanied by a slew of questions concerning the meaning of life, death, and plumbing. The bird and the gerbil were a whole other story. At ten years old, our younger son David was so enamored by his pet gerbil, Ritzy, that he caressed the rodent for hours on end and fed it all manner of gerbil treats: pears, melons, apples, oranges, cucumbers, and carrots straight from his hand. David was the only one in the family who could scoop up the elusive little fur ball and he did so with remarkable dexterity. Except that one day, David let Ritzy escape, granting the buck-toothed pellet pooper its freedom to explore the house. A messianic rodent, Ritzy disappeared for three days and three nights before re-emerging from the shadowy underworld, having proved to be a true weapon of mass destruction, gnawing through an entire set of Ikea dresser drawers to devour tee shirts, undershorts, and a whole precious set of Tin Tins before moving on to my wife’s collection of beautiful and expensive Indonesian baskets and then to the basement gyprock, before our distraught, grieving son finally recovered him, but only after we’d purchased another more rat-like version to replace him. For the year or so thereafter that Ritzy slowly and methodically ingested our home and hearth, my wife suffered from phobic heebie jeebies and would shriek like a banshee each time David thrust Ritzy upon her.
At around the same time, my father, Jim, was living alone in a townhouse in Aurora Ontario. Between 2001 and his death in 2005 he was a widower and spent all of his waking hours watching CNN, especially obsessing on the Iraq War, providing a running commentary on the unsavory cast of characters involved, notably “that dingbat Rumsfeld.” Being deaf as a post, dad always turned up the volume to full blast, and his high decibel 24/7 sessions with Wolf Blitzer must have driven the neighbors to distraction. One evening Jim heard mysterious crackling and rustling in his cellar. Perhaps sensing that a stray Iraqi insurgent group had tunnelled into his basement, he armed himself with his go-to weapon, a trusty two-by-four, and stealthily approached the source of the rattling before delivering a powerful wallop to what turned out to be the neighbour kid’s own pet gerbil, which had eaten its way through the shared cellar wall. Upon hearing the tragic news, our younger son once again donned his mourning apparel.
Soon after this unfortunate incident, Ritzy too met his maker, suddenly expiring after another busy day of consuming our furniture. We organized an elaborate funeral in the nearby woods, burying Ritzy with the honours usually associated with a revered dignitary. As the ceremony closed and the requisite tears were shed, a neighbouring child’s semi-domesticated pet squirrel fortuitously leapt out of a tree and onto my wife’s shoulder. Consternation not Britannia ruled the waves. From that day forward, there would be no more rodents in the vicinity of our home.
Concurrently, our humble abode harboured Lily the bird, a protégé of our older son Dan. Lily was a foundling, a female cockatiel who magically appeared on our porch one summer evening and was adopted by Dan as a feathered orphan. We soon deduced that Lily was almost surely released accidentally on purpose by her former owners. This bird was for the birds. She shrieked non stop like a hysterical howler monkey, only pausing for short naps when her cage was covered by a blanket. Be that as it may, Dan was devoted to Lily, cleaning her cage religiously on a weekly basis and providing her with the bird seed that she then spewed prodigious distances from her cage. Dan would vacuum up the offending seed, but waited until late Sunday night to do so when the rest of us wanted to sleep, his turn to become a weapon of mass disruption.
After a year or so of Lily’s shrieking, we realized that she absolutely had to go. It was us or the bird. We phoned pet shop after pet shop before a far away feather merchant agreed to take Lily off our hands. Both our sons treated us as Judas figures as we trundled Lily away, the bird shrieking all the while. And lo and behold, as if on uncanny celestial cue, Ritzy passed on to gerbil Valhalla the very next day. Our family was at last pet free… and our resentful boys treated us like petty thieves.
As adults, both sons have maintained their remarkable and touching love for animals, 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.
Your friend,
Robert
Robert McBryde – robertmcbrydeauthor.com
Author of
My Time With You Has Been Short But Very Funny/Le temps passé avec vous fut bref mais tordant
