First came The Arrival of The Kitten. (Cue the recording of Handel's Arrival of the Queen of Sheba.)
Simon Mayor - Arrival Of The Queen Of Sheba by pattynan
Who came not just to be cute but to conquer. A week or so later one of our beloved old cats passed away quickly but not entirely suddenly. The young person above them all took the loss pretty hard. They had also decided in their own mind that the immediate acquisition of another cat, an adult instead of just a kitten like the one we got a week ago, would be just the thing to do to parlay the sadness of our recent loss. I conceded that when the right cat comes along at the right time, I would make a decision.
A few minutes later my child above them all came running to me with their laptop and plopped it in front of me asking "How about this one?" and I'd shake my head and then they'd skim to another and ask "This one maybe?" and I said that this was happening a little quickly and then they showed me one whose "thirty days were all up tomorrow."
Gulp.
So then came The 18-Pound Siamese Sumo-Cat.
Wow. So the clock was ticking for that one. It turns out that the shelter is "no-kill" so that didn't mean what I thought it meant. Anyways, he's a big, affectionate, loquacious, morbidly obese, swirl-around-your-legs Seal-Point; eight years old. Elderly owners couldn't care for him anymore. He rapidly approaches any human who happens into proximity.
While these adoptions were ongoing I became rather ill-feeling and I missed several days of work. I kept thinking that I was "over it" when another little aspect of sickness would rear up: lower digestive tract, upper, nausea all the while... I went to work more of those days off than not, only to beg off to go back home. Missing work also has this affect on me: it rattles me. I get nerved out about it. Beyond the circumspect loss of time on the job and the absence from possible learning experiences, there is also a formidable feeling of estrangement from the workplace. For me this is not an entirely relaxing emotional position.
Then came another cat issue: The Great Neutering. While fully cognitively accepting the policy of spaying and neutering pets unless you plan on raising them yourself or selling them to other boutique breeders and owners, the child above them all still was emotionally distraught with empathy for the cat's physical suffering after the operation. We would try to allay this for the kitten by asking the veterinarian for a pain medicine we could give the cat at home.
"Then what do they do with them?" the child above them all asked me.
"With what?" I asked.
"With, you know," they said, "Them."
"Oh," I said. "Now I get it. Well, if you want we could give them a decent christian burial," to which I got a scowl in response.
"You're an idiot," my child above them all said before they stomped away.
*
"So," I asked my spouse, the clever one, "If you were going to take over the entire world, where would you start?"
"Bismarck" they immediately replied.
"You mean Bismarck North Dakota?" I quizzed.
"Yes, that one," the spouse above them all said, as if there were other sorts of Bismarckian geological Earthly planetary surface areas which might be under consideration.
That was the one. The one with the sign and the big yard.
So what followed was an explanation of why Bismarck would be such a great place at which to begin domination of the globe: It's a pushover. Nobody would fight us for it.
"Not even the people that live there?" I asked.
"Nope" my spouse replied, adding "And we won't have to worry about it while we're off taking over the rest of this great green orb."
Obviously.
*
We were trying to get our heads around it. I pointed out a diagram in a book and said "If space were just two-dimensional, like a plane," I indicated, "Then gravity created by mass would bend the space the way a bowling ball in the middle bends a trampoline surface."
"I'm having a little trouble trying to picture that in three-dimensional space," the child above all others said. I couldn't help much after that.
"Fossils I get," I said.
"Me too," they replied, "You and me and Lucy."
*
By four-year-old son Julian Lennon.
No comments:
Post a Comment