May 10, 2011
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1 So...my good friend Todd walks into a bar...
2 Todd is our seventeen-year old cat who was awakening every night at around 2 or 3 a.m. howlingly noisy about wanting to drink water out of a faucet.
3 We had suspected there might be more to his howling, but I thought either a toothache or perhaps thirst from potential diabetes. He passed a few tests last year, so we had no real reason to believe much was up, but last week he began bleeding from the mouth.
4 We took him in the other day and everything seemed okay, but it really wasn't. Turns out that he had cancer, and the doc said essentially that any surgery would probably be overly invasive.
5 Translation: he's going to die.
6 Yesterday morning during class I got a text from Caitlin telling me that he was at the docs and that it didn't look good...
7 I won't go into a lot of it, but the next text said simply, "Todd is gone." There was more, but that sank my heart.
8 It's funny, we complain about animals, but we also complain about friends, parents, and other family members sometimes, just for laughs.
9 Todd has always awakened in the middle of he night to howl and yowl about gawd knows what, for years. He has cried wolf time and again, so after a while we would just abide, give him running water from a faucet (he always INSISTED on running water) and eventually everybody would get back to sleep.
10 During the day you wouldn't hear a peep out of him. But at night he could awaken a sleeping giant, and even the Creator of the Universe, even if he/she were snoring. I heard the Creator himself threw a spiritual shoe at him, but it bounced harmlessly off is head. Caitlin is convinced that he is probably in heaven head-butting Jesus.
11 Anyway, he was a charming old lunk. He wasn't really a huge cuddler; rather he was a head-butter. If you were in his good graces, he would come over and bump heads, sort of like friends who wordlessly knock clenched fists to say, "Waddup, bro?"
12 Pretty good old fellow, overall, and in terms of pets, probably one of the better ones. His main flaw was waking up the dead every single night of his life, and insisting that he have running water so that somebody has to get up to do that for him.
13 Fortunately, our dog Phoebe ALSO would awaken, quite often at 4:20 in the morning, to go outside for a stint. When the two worked in tandem, it was fine, because you would be awake for one or the other anyway.
14 When they would scatter, however, it would be doom to anybody remotely attempting to get a good night's sleep.
15 He was more Caitlin's friend than everyone else's, and was there for her during some of her toughest times. But we all put up with him, and laughed at his antics.
16 I'm going to turn an area of my yard into a memorial area for lost pets over the years. We've had a few, and each has had an enduringly goofy personality trait, as do most pets.
17 And yet when they finally decide to leave us, is it any different than when any family member decides? In the midst of life we are in the midst of death, and a truer word was never said. That's either a direct quote by Thornton Wilder, or a paraphrase. I'm too lazy to check.
18 I don't know. I woke up at 4:20 almost by design this morning and realized I hadn't yet written the DN. Yesterday was a pretty emotional day for my family, so we coped as any normal family would: we plied ourselves with unhealthy foods like steak and cheesecake, even though everything we had could conk any one of us into a sugar coma in a New York second.
19 I guess that's the nature of these things. You don't know whether to laugh or cry, you call people, and then you cry, but then you laugh, and then you hug. I bought everyone cards that brought smiles and left them lying around. I walked outside and then back inside.
20 In the midst of life.
21 So maybe later today I'll figure out how to dedicate an area of my yard to a memorial. I actually turned an area of my yard into a meditation area last summer when I re-did the entire yard. It is a peaceful little area with a small statue of St. Francis overlooking it.
22 St. Francis, ironically, is the patron saint of animals, and has always been my favorite saint. He wasn't fond of the commercialism of religion and preferred instead to live in the country with the real people, and to remove God from all of the corruption and filth of money and greed. He felt that the church needed to stay pure, and in so doing, could re-connect with God on a very real level.
23 I'm not a super religious guy, as anyone knows, but I do have my very personal beliefs. I disdain the commercialism and corruption of many organized religions, but that's because of the man-made influences involving how money comes in, where it goes, the "rat-line" in World War II, the corruption of the Vatican, and lots of other things you don't need to go to far to discover.
24 I'm not trying to offend, so please remain open-minded about those beliefs.There is far too much evidence of hypocrisy and greed out there, and I simply won't argue facts with people who won't listen. So I keep it inside.
25 Spiritually I am in an entirely different direction. Too many miracles have happened in my life for me not to believe in a higher order. Too many amazing things and good things have happened in my life as a result of prayer. Too many coincidences have followed me ridiculously for years.
26 What it all is I have no idea. But my observations of spiritual things have duly noted occurrences that are beyond the realm of probability.
27 That's my little diatribe. I do that every now and again because I can only believe in what is empirical. I have told people time and again about the ridiculous amounts of coincidences that occur in my life on a daily basis. I'm reasonably certain that they happen to everyone, but to this minute I'm not so sure that it is as constant as it is in my own life. I'm not sure, because I've met few people who have this as a life pattern, or at least who notice it.
28 People continually roll their eyes, or say, "That happens to everyone." Uh...not so sure. Seriously. If it does, then people should start paying attention to these occurrences.
29 I'm running this train off the track, so I think I'll put it back and roll out of here today.
30 When a pet like Todd decides unexpectedly to leave us on a moment's notice, we aren't always going to behave logically or normally. When my Mom passed a couple of years ago, my entire family went loopy for a couple of weeks. I would fall down for no reason, put milk in the cupboard, and walk into rooms with no real destination. We all did, so that is pretty normal at times like these.
31 We have a teacher at school who called me last week because she wanted to arrange a meeting this Thursday, and she had TWO people die on her within three weeks. She talked about the same things. Out of sorts stuff.
32 I never thought that old duffer Todd would be able to create stuff like this, but dude, you done it. I misspelled around four or five words in yesterday's DN, so something was certainly up.
33 Okay, I guess that's my rant on a lost friend. It is as all over the place as my head is right now. I'll screw it on a bit more carefully and get back in no time.
34 Duty dictates.
35 You have a great day. Look to the sky and give my little pal a thought today. My family is suffering, even though he's just a cat.
35 He was our cat. And he really did rock.
36 We'll miss you old guy.
37 Peace.
~H~
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