September 11, 2011-September 12, 2011

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2011

It’s the 10-year anniversary of 9/11. My little blog seems insignificant compared to all this. Anything I write will ring hollow, so I’m retiring the old computer keyboard for the day.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2011

Week 2 of Operation Save Myself gets off to a wobbly start, to say the least. Cole and Liv have colds and barely make it out the door to school. I have a cold, too, and barely make it to the dining room table. Then there’s Fluffy, our cat. He has what appears to be a bladder infection and is scheduled to go to the vet at 8:30 a.m.

Fluffy basking in
his own glory.

Actually, Fluffy is only one of our cats. At last count, we had four others. Weird, I know. We never intended to become Weird Cat People, but Cassie and I are bleeding hearts, and things just sort of worked out that way.

First there was Fluffy. One day about six years ago, Cassie and the kids had too much time on their hands, and they wound up in a pet shop, where they spied the baby Fluff. Within an hour, he arrived home in a cardboard carrier. That flimsy little box couldn’t contain Fluffy, who burst out of it and all but said, “Here I am—deal with it.” Before long, he grew into a lumbering, overweight, ill-humored oaf. But for some inexplicable reason, the kids love him (and maybe I do, too).

Next came Charlie, whom we adopted from a shelter. Charlie is actually a she, something we didn’t find out until she was fixed a few weeks later. For some inexplicable reason, she worships King Fluffy, following him all over the house.

Next came Friday—not the day but the cat. Friday was a stray who was born in our yard. During a blizzard when he was a kitten, we rescued him from certain death. Friday never really bounced back from that snowstorm. He spends most of his time crouched in our furnace room waiting for the world to end.

Next came Penny and Ralph. We found them in some bushes next to our house when they were kittens and, of course, took them in. (Apparently, our backyard is an official feline birthing ground.)

But I digress. At 8:30, I cram Fluffy into a carrier, and Cassie takes him to the vet. This is more of a production than you might think. Fluffy’s file at the vet is affixed with a warning label. The workers there are afraid to handle him, so they wrap a plastic bag around the carrier and blow anesthetic gas into it. Only then, when he’s unconscious, is Fluffy deemed safe.

I battle through my cold at home until I get the call to pick up Fluffy. The vet tells me it is indeed a bladder infection. I’ve never met this particular vet, but the look in his eyes is familiar. I’ve seen it with past vets. It’s not quite a Kurtzian look—“the horror…the horror”—but there are unmistakable flickers of fear.

“After he woke up, he urinated on himself,” the vet tells me. “We tried to clean him, but we couldn’t get near him.”

The receptionist hands me a bill for $360, and now it’s my turn to wince. I didn’t earn any money today—not a red cent—and I’m out $360. No, it hasn’t been a particularly productive day. I load my urine-coated cat into the car and head home.