The More I Look, The More It’s The Same

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While writing the various chapters of “Living With Them”, I’ve come to realize something both wonderful and spooky. Writing the book, once I got ‘done’ (a book is never done, I’ve discovered) with the first chapters about animal spirits, biblical references to animals, scientific studies about human-pet relationships, I started to write about all of the pets I’ve known and loved.

Which is when I discovered something really, really odd. They all come back, especially the cats. They don’t dash outside and get lost and then come back, they die and then come back.

By some odd twist of fate or divine intervention, every single special cat has come back into my life and I have the photographs to prove it. It’s all pretty bizarre in that if you’ve read the book introduction, you find out that I’ve got a medical condition brought on by a reaction to an antibiotic and several life threatening infections which triggered the condition which caused a shift in my cranial cavity – my brain is damaged.

There is a section of my life that is almost a total blank. I can’t remember hardly anything from around 13 years old to my late teens. I don’t remember friends, what I did, what jobs I had other than generalizations. I clearly remember my life from the age of 2 on to about 13. My memory then picks up at around 20 years old or so, really about the time I got engaged to my first wife.

My mother put together a large photo album of my life – as I suspect many parents do for their middle age children – that has some really cool photos in it of my life which are kind of cool to look at but at the same time it’s like I’m looking at a strangers life. And this is where the cats coming back rears it’s divine intervention head. Tuxedo cats. These guys are following me around, popping up when I least expect it.

We have a cat, Ambrose Butterbutt, who is 16 and has a thyroid condition and has to take medication twice a day. No worries, slashed hands, spitted out pills, growling cats or emergency room visits, see the Canadian Veterinary Journal for more. I just take the pill, shove it in a syringe, dissolve it in some water in the syringe and squirt it into Ambrose’s pie hole. He doesn’t even object to it since he gets Temptations and raw steak afterwards.

Getting back to the divine intervention thing, while looking through the album and my photography over the years for image scanning candidates for the book, there is a Tuxedo cat that has been following me since my childhood. Right now his name is Ambrose Butterbutt but in his last incarnation he was known as Oliver North. Before that, I cannot remember his name.

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