The Ghost Kitty

About a month ago I was watching some Animal Planet show about cats with the kids.

One of the cat species profiled on the show looked a lot like our old cat Ginger.

I had never had a cat before her and, quite honestly, don't know if I'll ever have another cat. She was an awesome kitty right up to the end. So when we saw the cat that looked like her on TV we started to talk about all the Gingerisms she had like sleeping in the bathroom sink in the summer to her tendency to paw me in the nose in the morning to wake me up.

It was good times fondly remembering the family cat and shortly after, we all went to bed and drifted off to sleep.

And then it happened: In the middle of the night I swear I felt like she was walking on my bed. You know the sensation if you've ever had a cat or dog. I woke up the next day and thought about how I must have conjured up her spirit; about how talking about her brought a piece of her back into my life. I joked about how I thought her ghost was in my room and the kids and I just shrugged it off.

My son Cole asked if she got lost on the way to the Tropical World.

But since that night, I have had several - maybe a half a dozen - encounters in the middle of the night where I felt like she was walking on my bed. It's a very calming feeling despite the actually creepiness of thinking there's a kitty ghost up in the joint.

This one's for you Ginger...

It's Valentine's Day

Three years ago...

I was saved by DEVO

Two years ago 'round this time...

It was about holding steady and gentrification

and last year...

I revisted the pet issue

Charlie The Squirrel

 

Tuesday night after the family returned from the pool, a little baby squirrel came out of the shrubs next to our driveway and started to approach us.

It was a total Disney-like moment: you could almost see the thought bubbles over his head.

"Are you my dad?"

"Are you my mom?"

"Brothers??"

Now even though squirrels are everywhere in my neighborhood, I have never seen a baby squirrel.

This lil fella was clearly confused and scared.

And he kept looking at me like I gave birth to him.

When we went inside he followed us to the door like a puppy; all clumsy limbs and rocks for brains.

So I left a little bowl of water, some bread and some nuts out there for him and we called it a day. The next morning when the boys woke up they went out front to look for him but Charlie, as I had dubbed him because he just looked like a Charlie, was gone.

After I dropped the boys off at their respective school's I came back to do some laundry. The dryer didn't seem to be doing its job so I went out back to check the exhaust and was startled by a grey blob sitting on the lawnmower in my shed.

It's was Charlie.

And once again he looked at me like I was his parent and beagn to walk toward me. Once again I got some water and food and tried to place it near him but as I walked away he followed me.

So I went inside, did a little quick internet research, got a box, lined it with a towel and then went back out on to my deck. I picked up Charlie with another towel, he shrieked a shriek I've never heard, and I put him in the box. Then I ran some errands. A friend stopped by on his way running about town doing errands and I showed him Charlie. When we came out back Charlie again made a bee line toward me once he saw me and as I bent down to say hello I almost felt like he was about to jump on me.

By now it was 1pm and time to pick up Cole from playschool. He asked about Baby Jr. (his name for the squirrel) and I told him that Charlie was indeed still around and now on the back deck. When we pulled into the driveway, Cole barged out of the car, into the front door, out the back door and on to the deck to see the squirrel.

He was just sitting on the back rest of the bench chillin'.

Cole was totally excited to tell his brother so at 3:15pm we left to pick up Spencer from school and once united the two boys talked about the baby squirrel that was going to live in their backyard. When we got home Spencer went out back but Charlie was no where to be found. They boys played some before Spencer opted to ride his bmx bike around the back yard doing "stunts" dreaming of a day he'd be like Travis Pastrana. I went back inside to finish up the chili I was cooking for dinner when Spencer called out, "Dad! The squirrel! The squirrel!"

And as soon as I stepped out the door I saw Charlie in his rodent toddler gallop heading towards the deck. I scooped him up with a towel (more like he stepped on to it) and placed him back on the box. He was shaking. I then put on some gloves and held him and gently petted (is that even a word?) the little guy to comfort him. I guess it must of worked because after that he sat in the box and ate a raisan and an almond along with lapping up a bunch of water.

By then my wife came home and now Charlie was either trying to nap (my hunch) or dying (her hunch). Once again, after consulting the internet, we found a neighbor just a fews blocks away who was in the business of rehabilitating baby squirrels. So my wife and the boys took a short ride over to the woman's house to drop of Charlie.

The boys were bummed, and quite honestly, I was a little bit as well because we had all daydreamed about the pet squirrel that was going to live in our back yard yet be friendly enough to feed.

Once again a lesson was learned by my sons: wild animals should remain wild.

A Bird's Life

 


Turns out that the Carolina wrens that are living in our backyard are some horny birds.

The wife finally took the intiative to finish cleaning the shed which I tore apart during Round One of bird birthing and during the process we came to discover a new clutch of eggs. A lil internet research later and I found out that it is not that uncommon for wrens to have several broods during a season. I also found out that wrens are monogamous and pair up for life, foraging their territory year round.

So it looks like we're going to have our own bird Brady Bunch tweetin' around the yard in the next few months.

I'm sort of surprised to see that they came back to the shed after my attempted good to to rescue the hatchlings turned into total disaster. I had noticed them shift to the crepe myrtle on our side yard, then migrated to the a bush on the front so I was aware that they were still in the neighborhood so to speak.

What is surprising is that I haven't seen any activity going in or out of the shed so my hope is that they haven't abandoned the eggs. Now it has been oppressively hot so the backyard chillin' hasn't been on par as it usually is around this time of year.

At least they didn't make their nest in the oil pan under the paint pan again...

Pets: To Have Or Have Not*

It was my son’s third birthday and he got a little fish tank.

Both the wife and I grew up with fish tanks so delving into the issue of having a pet with a fish seemed like a reasonable idea.

Of course, we do have a proper pet - a cat named Ginger who has been with us since the early ‘90s. We got Ginger while we were living in Los Angeles. You see we had these friends who were real animal lovers. They lived in Tujunga, a small neighborhood above Glendale in the San Fernando Valley. And these people rescued just about any animal that they could; they had birds and cats and dogs and snakes and fish and hamsters and shit if you told me they had a flea circus I wouldn’t have been surprised.

So Ginger was rescued by them as a kitty from the netherworld streets of Los Angeles. She became ours by proxy; she was the only cat that ever warmed up to me and would always come to me whenever we were at their place. It was a no-brainer that when our group house situation dissolved in Glendale, that we would have this grey, short-legged Burmese come live with us in our Los Feliz apartment.

As the story goes, she was found by a dumpster near a Ford dealership in Tujunga. She turned out not to be neutered like we thought so we got her fixed. But that was after we discovered an infected sore underneath her fuzzy hair and had to have surgery for the nasty abscessed thing. She would also survive the great big rumble that was the Northridge earthquake and even traveled with us in our car during our exodus from Tinseltown and has been warming our hearts in North Carolina ever since.

But when the kids came along, she made herself scarce, occasionally showing her face after they went to bed. Friends and relatives often debated that she even existed becomes nobody but us ever saw the cat. They’d see the litter box in the bathroom or the food bowl in the kitchen and be like, “You guys have a cat?”

So to say that we didn’t have a pet would be a disservice to her.

Anyway, Spencer got one of those 2-gallon hexagon fish tank set-ups and we were off and running in pet fish land. I began to dream of a school of African cichlids brooding about in a wall-length aquarium but was quickly steered back to reality by my own memories of sticking my G.I. Joes’ in the family fish tank “scuba diving” only to contaminate the water and kill all the fish.

There was no way I was going to shell out top dollar for a bunch of fish that would be dead in a month’s time.

We tested the waters with some goldfish, but I don’t remember them lasting very long. We turned to a beta – the Japanese fighting fish. The fish had simple needs and could handle life as a loner. Spencer named him Blue, because, well the fucking fish was blue!

Blue had a good run of several months, maybe even half a year before he died during a 4-day trip to Maryland because we forgot to get someone to come over and feed it while we were gone. God bless cats, man. You just leave out some food, a little water and some fresh litter and they are good to go.

When Blue bit the dust, we had our first major trauma of having a pet: death. We had opted to flush the first batch of dead goldfish down the toilet to the Great Big Aquarium In The Sky, but with Blue Spencer wanted nothing to do with that – he wanted to give Blue a proper burial. He dug a hole, made a marker out of popsicles sticks and we had our moment of silence for Blue.

For a good year after that, every time Spencer drew a family picture he would include Blue. Of course the thing he scribbled on the paper looked nothing like a fish and I’d have to ask him what it was. “That’s Blue, dad,” he’d say emphatically.

I decided maybe we should get another beta for the kid. So we went to the local pet store and got a marble-colored beta for him. Spencer named him Lots Of Colors. He must have some Native American blood in him I thought after finding out the name of the new fish. I mean my wife was adopted so anything could be possible when we get to talking about bloodlines.

Lots Of Colors didn’t last very long. Spencer was older now and I didn’t supervise the feedings quite like I used to with Blue. I’d catch him feeding the fish three to four times of day, not the little pinch of flakes as instructed. We were talking gobs of food. The tank started getting dirty and green with algae. The fish would hide amongst the meager plastic plant and singular sea shell. This would cause Spencer to tap on the glass to see “if he was okay.”

Lots of Colors joined the other side a few days later. He lived long enough for us not to be able to get our refund back but short enough that we decided to bail on the idea of having a pet fish.

By this time, Spencer’s younger brother Cole had come along and Ginger sightings were more prevalent. I guess she started to figure out that if she wanted to get some attention she was going to have to come and get it.

In the mornings, both the boys would lay down with me in the morning on the floor of the family room and chill out to some Sesame Street. Ginger would waltz out from her nesting area under our bed and lay herself down next to us, allowing the boys to pet her while she groomed herself.

One day the phone rang.

I answered it.

It was some telemarketer and I quickly hung up and placed the phone back in the kitchen.

I came back into the family room and Cole was nowhere to be found. I called out his name. He didn’t answer. I went from room to room looking for him but didn’t see him anywhere.

I did this twice.

A slight panic set in.

I heard a noise in my bedroom. And again I walked in to find no child there.

“Cole, where are you?”

And then I heard a noise under my bed.

I figured it was the cat since she pretty much lives under there almost all day long every day. But then I saw a tuft of hair by the bed frame and under it a smiling face. And I realized that Cole had “followed” Ginger under the bed. I don’t know how he managed to get under there – it appeared I was going to have to lift the frame of our king size bed to help him get out because they was no way he was going to navigate his big head through it. Yet he did.

So he apparently chased the cat down the hallway and followed her under the bed to her secret safety zone.

I haven’t seen the cat in weeks and I’m thinking it’d be best to wait until the boys are a little older before talk of getting another family pet comes up again.

* a version of this essay originally appeared in Raleigh's The Hatchet.