Skip to main content

Annie Cat

Midway though our trip, our Annie Cat died.  It was inexorable.  For her, it was an awful wasting away.  For us, it was an awful decision to end what was left of her lovely life.  

I remember what I thought the first time I saw her, when she was six, at the Golden Valley Animal Humane Society:  "She is a scared old lady", I thought.  She did not come running to ask for a home.  She tried not to make vibrations when she walked.  She had been abandoned, not to an alley, but to another couple, and by them to the Humane Society.  

She never came running.  She always came gently. And while we were away on our trip, Michael, in Tucson, had to take her to the vet. In Minnesota, where we had found Annie, where we had found each other, Mari and I cried like . . . like I am doing now.

I know precisely what scared Annie.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

Rose-Colored Glasses and Job Training

About the time God was creating dirt, I enrolled in a church college, and commuted to school, where the President--a man of no uncertain opinions--often spoke in daily chapel, molding our young minds as the Creator himself had once molded Adam from clay.  There was too much organic matter in the dirt that I was, so I failed creative pottery.   The chapel was new during those years, and we heard often about the rose window at the east end, behind us, up in the balcony where dutiful student monitors noted which assigned seats were empty, and reported us to somebody.  Nobody reported which assigned seats were occupied.  It was the sinners who were important.   The College alumni magazine recently reported that the rose window has been refurbished; hauled off to California, and back again, to reclaim its glory.  The article did not note that I  had gone to California, too, years earlier, without achieving glory.  Nowhere in the article does it s...