Chapter 1
Bye-Bye, Birdie
This is a very sad story. I found myself troubled writing it, and I won't be surprised if you have trouble reading it.
This is the story of my pets, from when I moved to Texas forward:
I had four pets: Edith (a cat), Wilma (Edith's daughter), Kippi (a bird), and Big bird (take a wild guess on the species). My immediate family (still all alive, thankfully) is my father, Sheldon, my mother, Ruth, and my sister, Jenelle.
My father knew Big Bird, trusted Big Bird. He would take Big Bird outside, knowing that Big Bird wasn't about to fly off. Sometimes, Big Bird looked like he/she (no idea what the gender) was about to leave us, but he/she would come right back to my father's finger.
But, of course, Big Bird's curiosity eventually bested him/her, and... well, the whole story is vital. (it's not a death)
I was in the computer room when they told me that Big Bird had had a visit to the sky, and wasn't about to return. When asked why he decided to continue flying upward, my father said the following (red is directly quoted): "Because he flew up a little bit, and was unfamiliar with the area 2 feet above our heads, and was therefore scared. And when birds are scared, their gut instinct is to go up! And so, he kept flying around in an ever widening circle, and with each loop around, he was also flying higher. We heard him chirping, asking us for instructions on how to fly down, but he was unable. Time would be required for Big Bird to tire enough to slowly make his way back to the ground, but by then he had circled out of sight."
We put up signs for people to contact us if they saw Big Bird, with a big picture of the bird. We had several calls. Some were false alarms, others were people who found Big Bird, and then lost him/her. I remember one of those times, I thought I saw Big Bird flying in the distance.
Finally, my mother got a call. My sister and I came home from school, and there was Big Bird in the cage.
We looked at this bird, and we both immediately knew that this was not Big Bird, though our mother had thought it was. We could tell the slight difference in coloration, and a definite difference in behavior.
And then this bird made a strange, abnormal chirping sound. My sister interpreted the chirp as 'Pretty Bird,' thus the name of the new bird.
Big Bird remains lost in the wilderness (I would certainly consider Austin to be wilderness). Not a clue where he/she is.
Chapter 2
A Mere Divorce
What I am about to tell you is not directly related to pets. But it does have some significance, and besides, I want to tell this story.
It was Sukkot, a Jewish holiday that reminds us of the 40 years we spent in the desert, on our way to the Promised Land. Of course, being reform, my family doesn't follow all of the traditions. One thing we do, however, is build a Sukkah - a hut that Jews in the desert lived in. On this particular day, the Sukkah was long since set up, and we were in an active mood. My mother was waiting for us to settle down, to tell us all something. Finally, we did so.
My mother took us out to the Sukkah. Inside the Sukkah was a table and lots of other wonderful decorations. We all sat at the table.
"Dad and I are having a divorce."
She said it simply, and slowly (not like scary slowly; she was enunciating). Then she explained to us that we could tell anyone about it, that it wasn't private matters, and how long it would be.
InterChapter
At this point, I have two realities: the one at my mother's house, and the one at my father's house. Since these two realities are so vastly seperate (I wouldn't really say different), and rarely have any contact with each other, I will likely mess up on some of the chronological order. But I will do my best not to, and where I am uncertain, I will evenly space out the two realities.
Chapter 3
Young Cat, Old Death and Nonexistent Bird
My father moved out. His new home was an apartment with three rooms, if your definition of a room is regions of the apartment seperated by doors, including the bathroom, and five rooms if you count the living room/dining room/kitchen as three rooms; they were seperated by logic, and, in the case of the kitchen, (I'm assuming I remember correctly) a doorway without a door.
The pets? Just to review, we had Kippi and Pretty Bird, the birds, and Edith and Wilma, the cats. My father got Kippi and Pretty Bird, and my mother got Edith and Wilma.
At this point, we still had no idea the gender of the birds. The coloration of Pretty Bird made the appearance of a female, but that was human-based. I looked in a bird reference book, which I found on my father's book shelf (of all places).
I discovered, with my father's help, that Pretty Bird was, in fact, a male. It remained inconclusive about Kippi; it stated that some of the colorations are ambiguous, and Kippi had one of those ambiguous colorations.
As it turned out, Kippi was a female. We discovered that when she started laying eggs. My father was not prepared to have baby birds. We did a few attempts at research on what to do with them, but we weren't very motivated.
So Kippi continued to lay her eggs the natural way. As it turned out, the natural way was ineffective when laying them on bars, or even paper towels on those bars. Thus the title 'Nonexistent Bird'. She continued to lay unsuccessful eggs Indefinitely.
Wilma had been going through a lot. My parents were about to move around to different houses; my mother was going to move, and she decided that Wilma shouldn't be forced to suddenly go to an unfamiliar house. She was a very sick cat. Often, she would throw up. Therefore, she decided to put Wilma to sleep. She had been with us for over 10 years, since before I had been born. And now she was dead.
Okay, I just said that my parents were about to move. Don't ask me why, but what happened was my mother moved out to a new house, and my father moved back in. Thus, they were officially divorced (as apposed to divorcing).
Ruth got a new kitten called Debbie. She talked to everyone about her plan to let Debbie have kittens, and keep one male, named Lupert, and give the rest of them away.
My mother explained her plan:
"Debbie Friedman the Cat was named after I went to Hava Nashira - A retreat for Jewish songleaders that happens every june - in the summer of 2002 and met Rick Lupert, a quirky poet. He has a poem called "Debbie Friedman the Cat" which is very popular at Hava Nashira since Debbie Friedman the Jewish singer songwriter is always one of the intructors at Hava Nashira. When I wrote to Rick Lupert and told him I had named my kitten Debbie Friedman the Cat and that I planned to name one of her kittens Lupert, he wrote back and told me that he wanted to put Lupert the cat in his will."
Rick Lupert has a site here.
Chapter 4
More Species, Fewer Cats
We were in the car. I was watching outside as everything rushed past us. Unexpectedly, my father asked us (my sister and I) about getting a dog.
We both thought he was crazy; why would we ever get a dog? As for me, I was scared of dogs. Their scare technique worked quite well on me: barking. No, I couldn't imagine getting one of those creatures.
But then he took us to the Humane Society. When that happened, I realized that he wasn't kidding; we just might actually get a dog.
We wanted a dog who had short fur, so my father could run him/her, and was good with children. We tried out many dogs for a few minutes, and rejected many-a-dog. One of the dogs we asked about was an orange-ish dog with the strangest name attached. When we asked to try her, they said that's not her name; that's the name of her disease.
My father put in a list of requirements so they could contact him later if they found a matching dog.
Ages passed.
Okay, not ages, but it was a while.
Finally, while I was at my mother's house, my father got a dog! Her name was Twister. It was, in fact, the dog that had had the disease. I was still in Elementary school (don't get me started on the trip from there to my mother's house, which was in another school district), and my sister in Middle School. I came home earlier than her, mainly because Murchison Middle School ends later than Davis Elementary.
My father had said that Twister would be in the Laundry room, which was the first room from the garage.
She wasn't there.
And she wasn't in the kitchen.
The living room returned negative.
I didn't expect to find her in the hallway anyway.
A door on the left of the hallway led into the library.
Negative.
Wait -- what's that?
There was something in my father's bedroom, a big, mostly enclosed except for slits on the side, which I was facing, and the door on the front which I couldn't see, yellowish cage. I went into the room, crept around to the font, and finally saw her.
"Woof! Woof! Woof!" She let out a series of rather harsh barks. I immediately leapt back. I was, after all, quite afraid of dogs.
And today, viola, that has changed. Twister has completely transformed my fright for dogs.
Greene Family Camp, or GFC for short, was a Jewish camp that I stayed at for a month. I was at GFC. My mother was also away.
Edith and Debbie were left under our neighbor's care.
Plain and simple: Edith was run over by a truck.
We don't know any details. Our neighbor was nice enough to pick up Edith, a dead cat in the middle of the road, and bring her to the vet.
Two cats gone, we still had Debbie.
Chapter 5
The Wonder in Several New Lives
Just so you know, there's no deaths in this chapter.
We learned that Debbie was pregnant. We started researching what to do when you're going to have kittens. We found out how long the pregnancy lasts. We bought a little pyramid-house for the kittens, which Debbie checked out via instinct.
Jenelle and I were at our father's house. We were on transition from father's to mother's. He decided to bring Twister along with. When we arrived, we found that our mother was not there, so we went around in back. Finally, our mother arrived.
We went inside. A discovery awaited us there.
Debbie had 4 kittens in the pyramid, along with herself.
Sometimes, the shortest moments last the longest, and it's hard to describe them without going into real time, which goes by in a flash. I looked in there, and saw those real cute kittens.
I reached out my hand and stroked one of them. Apparently, my mother didn't think I could see them in there, but I could.
These kittens would be with us for the next few months.
Chapter 6
One Less Cat, One More Kitten
I guess the previous, death-free chapter went by a little too fast.
Debbie took good care of the kittens. There are a few pictures of the Kittens and Debbie on my father's site, here. The thumbnails section has the bulk of them.
For a while, trying to see the kittens was a matter of bending down and looking into the pyramid. Sometimes I would pet them. When they complained using their high-pitched squeaks, Debbie would meow at me, not a vicious meow, but a 'back away' meow. I think she trusted us around her kittens.
Eventually, they started coming out. We saw them all in their different colorations. I interpreted a pattern among the colorations, which I won't describe.
Too soon, we were going to GFC. There, I talked often about the 4 kittens that I had, as well as a cat, a dog, and 2 birds! Although I didn't realize it, I became quite well-known for having a couple hundred pets (I'll get back to that next year).
Anyway, toward the end of my stay there, I got a letter from my mother, with a picture of each kitten enclosed with their temporary names, Phantom, Lil' Debbie, Lupert, and Darlin'. There was a note about the fact that she had brought them to the vet. We had already known that Lupert was a boy; she discovered that Lil' Debbie was also a boy at the vet.
When we came home, she had given away two of the kittens. One of the remaining two had been claimed, and the other we were keeping (Lupert).
So now we had Lupert, Phantom and Debbie.
Okay, now comes the bad stuff.
I was up in my room, doing I-forget-what, and came down, to find that my sister was coming upstairs. She held a towel in her hand. And in that towel was Debbie, fur singed, breath raspy.
We were going to go to the vet.
When we opened the door outside, we found Phantom right there. But the incident had occured in the back yard. We put Phantom inside, and went straight to the vet.
We still didn't know where Lupert was. We had had a cat who needed to go to the vet quickly, so we hadn't bothered to look around thoroughly. They got to work, telling us to go home and look for Lupert. We did so, failed, and returned to the vet.
There was a sign posted up saying that they were taking care of a medical emergency. Soon, someone came out and took down the sign, letting us in. She told us the bad news.
We got to see Debbie one last time. Her eyes were wide open.
She was dead.
This was the most meaningful life, and death, among my pets. I had gotten friendly with Debbie, and she trusted me. I didn't usually have great chemistry with cats (kittens were just fine), and Debbie was the exception. I couldn't believe that when I got friendly with a cat, she died.
Finally, we went home. We found Lupert up a tree. He came down in a matter of minutes, on his own. Phantom was to leave that day. The claimer called up and told us to keep her, since we had lost one of our cats.
My mother recalled what happened:
"I saw that the dogs had esaped and I went to the neighbors front door to tell them so. Noone was home and when I returned I saw the dogs attacking debbie. I thought she would win the fight so I watched a moment. When I realized she was not winning I pulled off the larger gold dog [Parker] by his collar who stopped attacking. The smaller black dog [Boone] kept attacking so I got between him and debbie and was hitting him on the nose to make him stop attacking debbie. As I was doing that I was thinking that it was probably not wise to hit an attacking dog but I did it anyway. We took debbie to the vet having located phantom at the front of the house."
One less cat, one more kitten.
Chapter 7
Frankenstein's Appearance
My father had been dating for a long time. Finally, he found someone, Miriam, and they got engaged. About a half a year before the marriage, Miriam moved in (a hefty task which the movers failed at). She had three dogs! That gave us a hefty four.
All of them were mutts (multiple breeds in one). We had Twister, the crazy part-basenji (we recently discovered that basenjis are among the top closest to a wolf; we don't call her the Orange Maniac for nothing) We had Alex, the huge, easy-going part-lab. We also had Meiko, the chocolate-colored, nice, sweet, part-pit-bull (don't look it to me, but who am I to judge?). And finally, there was Dolly, the very VERY shy border-collie (it took her a long time to get used to us).
Transition day. We were transitioning from our mother's house to our father's house. It was much later; if I remember correctly, my father and Miriam were married by then. Our father told us before we got there that Meiko had gotten into an accident.
When we got home (from home), We saw that she had stitches all the way down her side. It was a gruesome site indeed. We decided to rename her FrankenDog. Miriam told us her story.
Meiko had only been alone for about 10 minutes. When Miriam came home, the other dogs excitedly greeted her. Meiko limped there, as if saying "Miriam, I don't feel too good." Miriam rushed her to the vet, worried that she wouldn't make it. Luckily, Meiko survived the ordeal. The name FrankenDog didn't last long.
For quite a while after she lost the stitches, you could still feel the scar through her fur. I was her owner; I had taken it on myself to train Meiko (which I was very successful at, and still am). Her scar has pretty much disappeared at this point.
She has a free-spirited mind; she loves to run off. I've gotten her well trained, and am able to drop the leash during training sessions (I never take the leash off), but sometimes she discovers that she has freedom and runs off. Nowadays, it only happens about once a month, which is still pretty bad, but the good news is she always heads straight home, rather than taking a huge detour that lasts ten minutes of worry.
One thing I have trouble grasping is her failure to understand that I'm not just giving her strict orders for the sake of being boss; I care for her. When I started biking her, she was very nervous, and I kept watching her every move, and on occasion giving her a command, mainly for her safety. She's still very nervous when a car comes our way, and sometimes, she draws dangerously away, causing me to loose control of my bike.
But enough of that.
Chapter 8
A Chirp and a Chatter
Summer came back around and Jenelle and I went to GFC. Now, like I said, I hadn't realized that I had gotten well known for having so many pets.
So when we played a game of writing down a characteristic of ourselves, putting them all together, and randomly picking one, I put down that I have four dogs. That one was guessed immediately, and when I asked how they knew, they started ticking off how many pets I had said that I had. I realized that they hadn't a clue of anything that had been happening, and knew me mainly for 4 kittens and a million others. They probably hadn't ever remembered only one dog.
So I decided to tell them all that had happened this past year. I don't usually stay up late, but this night, I wanted to tell the story.
First, I briefly stated that we had gotten three dogs, resulting in four.
Then, I got into Debbie's ordeal. I tried to tell the story as accurately as possible, and mostly succeeded.
I didn't get to FrankenDog (in fact, like I said, I probably got it out of order; Meiko might have gotten into her accident after this).
Toward the end of my stay at GFC, I got a letter from my father. I don't have it anymore. It had a bunch of stuff at the beginning, and one paragraph devoted to an incident that had occurred. Miriam wrote a short story about it:
It happened last summer, while I was at home and the kids away at camp (learning Jewish folk songs and collecting bug bites). I had let the two cockatiels out of their cage to stretch their wings and was keeping a close eye on the situation, as my dogs still hadn't decided whether these spunky little songbirds were food or family.
The doorbell rang with the usual accompaniment of barks as the two bigger dogs ran to the front door. The two "little dogs" (not that much littler, but much more shy), found their hiding places and made themselves invisible. The woman standing at the door was in her thirties and looked like your average soccer Mom - short hair, petite figure, casual clothes from Old Navy or The Gap.
She said hello and introduced herself, then asked me what "services" I attend and if I was a member of Agudas. I jumped to the conclusion that this was someone from the Agudas Achim congregation, perhaps a Sisterhood lady, come to ask for some volunteer service or donation or just to give me information.... So I chatted on with her for a while about the different synagogues in our town.... And then she pulled out a Jehovah's Witness "Watchtower" magazine and handed it to me.
She might as well have handed me a vial of arsenic. I believe I actually recoiled. Instantly, I felt duped and angry. Our door has a sign that says "Shalom, Y'all" (the correct translation of "Shalom Aleichem"). I guess she had known from that, or from our name, or both, that this was a Jewish home.
"I'm not interested," I said.
"Just take it for later. You don't have to read it now," she said, holding out the magazine.
"I'm not bringing that into my home," I snapped at her. I stepped back and shut the door.
I was sweating and my heart was pounding. I went to the bedroom to wash my face. It was then that I heard one of the birds screeching. Though one hesitates to assign emotions to birds, I have to say his screeching sounded desperate. Unlike any sound I had ever heard from him before.
I rushed to the front hallway in time to see the female cockatiel caught by my terrier mutt. Meiko had the bird in her mouth and was carrying it. The larger male bird - bright yellow wings flapping -- circled around Meiko, diving down and then climbing up, screeching, crying, screaming.
I yelled at Meiko to "drop it! drop it now!" She dropped the bird and I ran to pick her up. It was already too late. The tiny body was lifeless. There were no teeth marks or blood; no injury, but no heartbeat. For a few moments, I held the small creature. She had been a sweet bird. Friendlier than the male, she was very affectionate with people. She sang to us, chatted with us, happily perched upon us.
Later, when I thought about it, I felt that the death of the gentle bird and the intrusion of the missionary were somehow connected. My attention had been diverted. I had been fooled. And in that moment of inattention and gullibility, the dog attacked, the bird was caught, and one small song silenced.
I got a couple of gerbils some time into school. One of them ran off a month afterward. I still have the other, but I may give him up, because he's a carnivore for fingers, and I'd rather give him up than my fingers.
Chapter 9
The Worst of it all And the Little Moments
It doesn't get much worse than this. A slow, very painful death. Lupert is no longer with us, because he spent a night being a cat. In this case, curiosity truly did kill the cat.
It is in smaller text (and it's only two paragraphs), so you can easily
skip it.
We were away when it happened. Afterword, our neighbor told us; again, she
was so nice as to take care of the situation when we were gone. She showed us
how he had gotten caught in the car door.
His toe had gotten caught between the door and the front part of the car.
He had gotten his toe in there from the top, sitting on the hood. And then he
fell. At the bottom, he was unable to get his toe out. He hung there all
night, and by morning, he was dead.
So now we only had Phantom.
I had a Sunday School Camping Trip much later. I'm used to camping, there were no pets there, and even if there were, they would have been well taken care of. So what's this got to do with this story?
Technically, this camping trip is the creator of this true story.
That evening, people were telling scary stories around the fire, as is customary to do when you have about 25 kids camping.
Now, can you put these ideas together? Scary stories around the fire, and significant to this story that's all about pets dying.
I told my story about Debbie dying, and went from there forward, except only talked about my cats. I found myself backtracking a lot, because I was having trouble remembering things that were important to the story. My toungue was going faster than my brain, and I can assure you, my toungue was going pretty slow even so.
And later on, I realized that if I wrote a story about it, I would be able to backtrack without anyone noticing, since nobody's read the story when I backtrack.
Thus, a camping trip inspired a story.
I started my story by planning out the chapters (that process actually does help; it just doesn't help that much when you're writing a story that you're not even interested in, like at school with a given topic). And I sent out my first draft to my family, who were part of the story, and knew the story, and therefore could help me correct the order of events. I did get quite a few corrections.
But then I needed an addition. And here it is.
We got a new cat. My mother's friend was moving out to marry, and wanted us to keep his cat. The cat's name was BT (for Big Twin), a male, who was very nervous around us. One of his first moves in our house was to run behind the couch.
For the next few weeks, he rarely left that couch. When we introduced him to Phantom, they had a hissing match. (Phantom still associates that couch with BT, even when BT isn't there)
One day, I tried to get him out of the couch. As soon as I got him out, he ran off. It took me a while before I retrieved him, and then, I sat down with him on a different couch from the one he so dearly loved to hide behind.
And I started to pet him. I pet him for the longest time, until finally, he began to purr. And then, I stroked him some more.
Stroke... Stroke... Stroke...
Well, the cats are moving along well. Phantom has stopped associating the couch with BT, and we've long since started letting BT outside. While he is clearly attached to our house as a home that he will always return to, he spends a lot of his time outside.
I just wanted to make a point that my mother was recently on a 3 week trip and our neighbor took care of the cats. There weren't any casualties.
BT has gotten skinnier this last week. We were worried about his refusal to eat. When my mother took him to the vet this morning, they said he was sick and going to die. Now we're just waiting for that to happen.
BT is dead. We buried him in the backyard, beyond the fence, and piled a few rocks on top. I will try to get a picture of the grave soon.
I've got a page of progressively closer images to the grave. Click here to see the images. No, I did not set up the rocks.
Happy new year! And I mean happy. We've discovered a new park about 3 blocks away from our house, which our dogs have a love for roaming. For them, it's heaven (however, Meiko somehow managed to get blood all over her tongue. Whether she found something or she cut her tongue is a mystery, but tongues heal fast, so it wasn't a big deal).
I've just gotten home from a vacation with my mother and sister to my grandparents. We spent a day at my mother's house, and Phantom was glad to see us once again. She immediately returned to her routine of begging for food. She's gotten fat, so we're putting her on rations. She's happy enough without so much food, but she still complains.