Where's the Cat?...Fear of A Brown Planet...

We were upstairs, she was colouring pictures and I was learning new pipe tunes. I'm not certain how it came about but the topic turned to favourite words.
Isobel: "Daddy, what's your favourite word?"
Daddy: "Umm...Isobel. My favourite word is Isobel."
Isobel: "Really?"
Daddy: "Sure, why not? Some would say that Isobel is a name and can't be used like that but I don't care."
Isobel: "What about a different word?"
Daddy: "I don't really have one, then. What's your favourite word, Pick?"
Isobel: "Hell. No, wait...Damn. No,...Shit. Definitely Shit."
Daddy: "Shit, not Shite?"
Isobel: "No, that's Scottish. My mouth hurts when speak Scottish. Only sometimes when I say Shite, it doesn't hurt."
Daddy: "Oh yeah, like when?"
Isobel: "Like when you practice bagpipes."
Daddy: "Huh?"
Isobel: "It sounds like Shite when you play your chanter."


I remember the drummer of one of the bands I played with speaking fondly of his dog. 'Clancy', a Scottish terrier and his very best friend. He told me of how they were all but attached at the hip and that wherever he went, Clancy would go too. For many years it was like this, Clancy would be the first thing he saw when he woke up and the last thing he saw before he went to bed.
Then one day he arrived home from school to be met at the door by his father who exclaimed,
"Don't bother looking for Clancy, he ain't here."
We had many pets growing up. Mostly cats and dogs and we loved them all and in spite of that, they all died. Insensitive bastards. They tell you that having pets is a good way for your children to learn the realities of life...that we are born, we live a while and then we die. Stuff and nonsense...If it teaches your children anything, it's that if you pour your heart and soul into loving something, it still gets old and you take it to the doctor and it doesn't get to come home...well, that's what it teaches your kids anyway...that message was completely lost on me and therefore on my offspring as well.
There are two pets that we had that I remember very well, I remember their deaths equally well. It's funny the things that seem to have little meaning at the time, beyond what's on the surface, that creep back up years later.
We had a cat called Cocoa. I say we but he was my mother's cat and eyed the rest of us with little more than contempt. We would follow him around the house hoping he would 'allow' us to lavish him with affection and occasionally he would stop and allow a scratch on the head or a mild pat on the back. We loved him and for our trouble, he tolerated us.
He got old...very old and deaf and he would sleep for very long periods of time.(My Auntie Peggy would do the same thing and she lasted forever too) He wandered away and we looked for him for days afterward. We all figured the worst when we couldn't find him. We just figured he went outside and fell asleep and didn't wake up. The smell coming from underneath my sister's bed, told us he had not gone outside. But he was dead. There was no mistake there. My father pulled him out from under the bed ( I would have but he wouldn't let me touch it) The cat was as hard as a carp.
Everyone was quite sad around the house, hell even my father got a little misty when he spoke of burying him in the backyard. I didn't get it. It was a cat. Sure we loved it and fed it and took care of it...and then it got old and died. Get a new cat? It made perfect sense to me then as it does now.
We also had a dog...a Schnauzer called Ollie. He was a dear family pet and loyal and we loved him and he loved us back. He was tied to a pear tree, the same pear tree he had been tied to the whole of his life. This time however, a gigantic colony of yellow jackets (that had taken up residence in the roof line of our house) had decided that the pear tree was a good source of food for their thronging multitude and therefore belonged to them.
I remember one of my friends running up the street screaming that my brother was trying to drown our dog with the garden hose. When I got back to my house saw that my brother was trying to drown the thousands of yellow jackets that had swarmed our dog. My mother and father both came home from work and took the dog to the vet. They came home and the dog didn't. I heard stories of the horrid noise the dog made at the vet...I can only imagine there were like the horrid noises he was making before my parents got home.
Again, everyone around the house was blubbering and bawling for days...except me. It's not to say that I wasn't upset. (I was) It's not to say that I am cold-hearted.(though I may be) It was a dog. It wasn't my father or mother, he hadn't rescued me from the well and he didn't ever bring anyone brandy during a snow storm. (as far as I am aware). He was born and he lived and he got himself stung to death by a pissy horde of yellow jackets, high on fermented pears. My father buried him in the backyard next to the cat. Life went on. We got another dog and another cat and they all lived and they all died and nobody's life was any the worse because of it.
So why maudlin stroll down memory lane? A couple of weeks ago saw the death of the last cat in the house. Brooklyn. She got old and sick (cancer) and peed all over anything that stood still for more than a couple of minutes. To our credit we tried to make her better but she was seventeen and vet bills ain't cheap. When we found it was more or less hopeless, we decided it would be better for her to be put down.
Mrs. Narrator was an emotional puddle pretty much after we made the decision and who can blame her...Brooklyn was her cat. Her last cat. So naturally the dirty work fell to me and I went to the vet, heard about the options and the prices or the options and after hearing that it was all fairly fruitless, I told her we wanted the cat put down.
The vet took a gigantic breath and asked if I would like to be with the cat when she was put down...I'm certain there are people that need this kind of closure. I am not one of them. I politely told her no while my brain screamed 'are you off your nut?' And that was it. I was given the carrier we brought the cat to the vet in and Isobel and I walked out.
I worried for a day or two afterward, what I might say if and when Izzy asked me about the cat. Burt the question never came. Not for almost three weeks.
"Daddy," she began.
"Uh-huh?"
"When is Brooklyn coming home, anyway?"
I scrambled to think of something to tell her, something to soften the blow a little. I have told my children for as long as I can remember that they will always get the truth from me.
"She's not coming home honey." I said.
"What do you mean, not ever?" Izzy asked.
I could hear the emotion rising in her voice and thought I had better choose my next words carefully.
"No honey, not ever. Remember when we went to the vet and we came home without Brooklyn?"
"Yes..."
"Well she was very sick and..."
"She's dead?"
"Yes Honey, she's dead."
"Thank god," she said. "I hated Brooklyn. Gimmo I liked but Brooklyn I can't stand Brooklyn."
We were putting her laundry away a little while later and I was putting blankets in the bottom of her closet.
"No Daddy, you can't put them in there."
"We can put them in there," I said. "Brooklyn isn't here anymore."
"Oh yeah," Izzy said. She won't piss all over my closet anymore."
...Anybody know of any free kittens?




It's funny to think of the things that shape your life and turn you into who you are. To this day I can't cook a grilled cheese sandwich without getting a headache but that's a story for another day. Isobel's defining moment came about a month ago and it affected her deeply...it is still affecting her.
We had a flood in the bathroom. The toilet was left un-flushed and was used a time or two too often and with too much toilet paper. The result of which, was a flood in the bathroom.
She saw me tearing across the hall to get the plunger and asked what was wrong.
"Somebody put too much toilet paper in the toilet and now it is over flowing. I have to get the plunger before the water goes all over the god-damned bathroom." I said.
In retrospect I probably shouldn't have been quite so dramatic or at least not so 'holy crap the world is going to end if I don't plunge this toilet right effing now!' about the whole ordeal.
After all was said and done Isobel came up to me and tried to wrap her hear around what had all just happened.
"So if you put too much toilet paper in the toilet, it makes a flood?" she asked.
"Yes," I said. "the toilet paper blocks the hole where it all goes down and the water comes out of the toilet...along with everything else."
And that was the exact moment I altered the natural course of my child's life. From that point to this very day, regardless of the length of time she spends in there or the amount of waste she leaves behind (and from the smell of things, you would think a long haul trucker from Pocatello had been in there before my five year old princess) she will use no more than two or three sheets.
I used to think maybe it was a dainty girlie thing but the absolute look of fear that crossed her face when I suggested she could use more than just a couple of sheets told me that this was not the run of things...I don't know that she will ever get past this...maybe if she floods a toilet of her own and sees that it isn't end of the world, despite what her father may do.
At least I'll know where to go for toilet paper if the apocalypse ever comes...