hardwood – Page 10

Do or Do Not, There Is No Try

After giving praise to the Oregon Humane Society and our vets at Laurelhurst, I have a major bone to pick with both of them. The Humane Society told us that Sam might have an upper respiratory infection, had diarrhea, and had been treated for fleas and ear mites. All good, we wanted to know as much of the little guy’s medical history as possible. Sam got an exam at Laurelhurst as soon as possible and it was discovered that the mites were probably gone but he had a yeast infection in his ears, so we’ve been treating that.

But how is it that both of these fine organizations neglected to tell us that little Sam has Jedi powers? I was watching Sam and Emma play with their furry mice when suddenly Sam began to levitate the albino mouse. Fortunately I had my camera in hand to document the event, as people tend to not believe me about things like this.

Maybe we should have named him Yoda?

A Little Good News

Scout passed her yearly exam at the vet with flying colors. My wife reports that she was even snuggling up to the staff and giving them her little headbutts — probably trying to make up for the last time when she jumped up to the little gap above the cabinets and settled in for a nap, forcing them to get a stepstool to get her down.

And no matter how it may seem, this blog hasn’t gone all cats, all the time — it has helped me a great deal to talk about Templeton here, but I’ll start mixing the cat stories in with some of my wildlife pictures, as I have a bit of a backlog building up.

Remembrance

Today’s been an emotional roller coaster. When I awoke from the comfort of sleep this morning, I thought I was going to be OK. And I was for a while, but as the day wore on Templeton’s absence was too hard to ignore — Christmas was one of his favorite times.

I put up the Christmas tree yesterday, and that was the first time I realized something was wrong with Templeton. He loved the tree and the big box it came in, and when he didn’t come upstairs while I assembled it, I went down to get him. He wasn’t interested in the tree and was all hunched over when he walked — we left for the vet a little while later. In the space of a few hours I went from thinking he was fine to holding him as he died.

Today we decorated the tree and put up the rest of the Christmas decorations. There was the nativity set he loved to stick his head in, the ornaments he liked to play with, the tree he liked to sleep under and the tree skirt he loved to sleep on (and hack up hairballs on), the decoration that he’d chew on if we didn’t watch him, the wrapping paper he loved to play on.

Normally when I’m upset I like to snuggle up with Templeton — he loved to snuggle and would emit this wonderful purr that helped me relax. He was just so happy when he was with the ones he loved. I wish I could do that now.

I’m working on a novel in which the pets of my life are the major characters — Templeton of course is one of the main characters in the first story. One of the joys of writing is that these characters have lived in my head for the past couple of years, a mixture of the pets in real life and the characters from the story, and thinking about them has helped me when I’m down. One of the central themes of the story is dealing with loss, so they have come in useful over the past year.

Those voices have been silenced temporarily, as the present loss overwhelms my thoughts, but in the long term I know they will return. One of the characters is based on a dog named Ginger that we had when I was in college but who died very young, it’s been a joy to have her character from the book bring that lovely little dog back into remembrance on a daily basis.

I know someday soon the same will be true for Templeton, but for now it is time to grieve.

Yesterday’s picture was from January 2001 when we lived in Keizer, Templeton was playing with one of his catnip bags and took a momentary break. I had just gotten my first digital camera the week before at Christmas, so it’s one of my earliest digital pictures.

Today’s picture is from December 2004 and taken at our house here in Portland, he’s watching the Christ child in the nativity set.