Category: Relationships

The Cat with Magic Ears

It was the middle of July in 2016. I had just walked in the door from work. Renee was 11 months out from her heart transplant, and I was running a day shelter I had founded. It had been a particularly bad day. I had a lot of them that year. I was getting something to drink in the kitchen when she called me into her studio.

“I want you to hear me out before you say no,” she said.

Over the winter, our orange tabby Tony had caught a blood clot in his legs, and we had to take him to the vet in the middle of the night and have him put down. Tony had been Renee’s cat – they even shared the same heart disease, called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is very common in cats and very rare in humans. In the days after her coming home from transplant, Tony had laid in the bed next to Renee as if he knew she needed more comfort than normal. His loss had been felt very keenly.

So she had been crawling the pages of the local no-kill shelter, looking at orange tabbies. It was just window shopping – we knew we lived in a small house, and the two cats we had were already pushing our limits.

She showed me a picture of the most bedraggled orange cat ever. He had deformed ears and terror in his eyes, and his hair was thin. He looked like a stuffed cat that had lost half his stuffing. She told me his name was Pepe, and he had been at the no-kill shelter for more than a year. Because he was ancient and ugly, nobody wanted him. He also had a healthy dose of anti-social behavior.

I reminded her that we had said we were a two-cat house, and we already had two cats. Since he had been there a year, she asked me if we didn’t adopt him, who would? I think he might be a lost cause, I said. That has never scared you off before, she said.

I asked what the fees were. She told me that she had already reached out to the shelter, and since Pepe had been so hard to rehome, they would waive all the fees if we came up that Friday.

So that Friday, we went to pick up Pepe, the cat with the magic ears.

If anything, he looked worse in person. He was so skinny, and his fur was patchy. He and several other cats had been dropped off at the shelter the year before. At some point, Pepe had a horrible ear infection that ate away at his ears and damaged his hearing. He had been covered in fleas when they left him at the shelter. He was afraid of people – the shelter folks believed he had been beaten in his past.

He lived in a giant walk-in cage with other cats but was cowered under some boxes, hiding. He looked virtually catatonic. He didn’t want to be held or petted or played with. He came out of the boxes long enough to eat the snacks we gave him, and then he went back into hiding.

The shelter tried to be realistic with us.

“He has been horribly abused. He doesn’t like to cuddle, and he isn’t really affectionate. But he is special and needs a home where people will love him.”

So we signed the papers and agreed to take care of him for the rest of his life. Our first clue to how hard this was going to be was fighting to put him in the cat carrier and his screaming once we shut the door. We had to wrap the carrier in a towel to calm him down, and while most families have pictures of the adoptive parents holding their new kitty, we have one of us holding a towel-covered pet carrier with dazed looks on our faces.

We gave Pepe his own room at the house, with a closed door so he could be comfortable before we introduced him to the other cats. He promptly found every hiding place in that room and spent much time just staring into space. If you tried to pet him, he would attack your hand and then go hide again.

It went like that for about four months. But in the mornings, we would find his toys scattered, and his food had been eaten, so apparently, he was having a ball when we weren’t looking.

Eventually, things changed. He began to come out of the room, began to play with the other cats, and even would sit on the couch with us. He was our very introverted kitty – he wanted to be near us, but not actually touch us. As introverts ourselves, we understood this.

He was still very shy when we loaded all the cats into cat carriers two years later and moved 12 hours away. But I swear Pepe in Mississippi was a whole new cat. He was no longer the tentative, shy cat. He was full of confidence in our new home. Instead of hiding in the corners, he would lay in the sun on the rug in the middle of the floor. Our vet suggested that moving had put all the cats on an equal footing n the new house. Literally, the pecking order had changed.

In any event, for the next year, Pepe thrived. He gained weight, his coat filled out, and he would even climb in your lap and purr. The cat they warned might never love us back was affectionate and loving. It was the best year.

Things started to go downhill in the fourth year he was with us. His personality was still the same, but he wasn’t eating. The vet told us he had a horrible infection in his teeth and gums, and because of his FIV, he didn’t have the resources to fight it off. They gave him antibiotics and hoped for the best.

He recovered – for about six weeks. Then we had to go back for another round of shots. Each round, he had lost more weight, become more lethargic, and ate less and less. In the summer of 2020, it became obvious we were fighting a losing battle.

We had a foster son living with us at the time. He identified heavily with Pepe, and while the other cats would run and hide from him, Pepe tolerated his hugs. The night before Pepe died, we all sat with Pepe on the floor of the living room, and we petted him and told him we loved him; and that night, when I tucked the boy in bed, we talked about how when you love something or someone, you have responsibilities as a result. We had promised to take care of Pepe, and helping him die well was part of that.

I told the boy that you have to do the right thing for those you love, even when that is not something you want to do.

The next day a neighbor watched the boy while we went to the vet for Pepe’s last visit. He was purring in our arms when he got the shot. At that point, he was skin and bones, less than half his body weight when we had gotten him.

That was 23 months ago. A few months after Pepe died, the Boy went back to his family. Pepe is buried in the backyard, under a headstone Renee and the Boy made together.

I think about Pepe a lot. This cat that they told us would never have the tools to love us ended up loving us after all and taught us a lot about love along the way. He taught a hardened, traumatized boy in the foster system how to love, and he purred in our arms as we watched him die.

Shortly after we got him, when he was having such a hard time adjusting, we decided that if all he gets is to spend his remaining years in a loving home filled with kitty treats and toys and with people committed to loving him even when he doesn’t have the resources to love us back, that is a lot more than he would have had in the first place, and a lot more than any of us deserve. But for a few years, we got a lot more than that, and so did he.

Garden Party

Chairs were spread out in a semi-circle under the pine trees. There was a selection of wine, beer, and water bottles on the back porch. At the other end of the table was a platter with potato chips and some sort of dip. People milled about, drinking their beer and chatting. I didn’t know any of them, but many of them seemed to know each other. At age 50, I appeared to be one of the youngest people there.

I had been invited to this gathering of gardeners in the little village within the city in which I live. It’s more than a neighborhood – more like a collection of neighborhoods. We are holding a garden tour this fall, and if you have more than two daffodils in your yard, you got invited to this meeting.

Eventually, we settled down and held the meeting. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you about. It was what happened afterward.

It feels anti-climactic, honestly, but we all hung around, chatting and learning about each other after the meeting was over. Then, when everything was put away, and it was clearly time to go, we did the parking lot hangout. You know – that thing where you stand in the parking lot and are reluctant to leave because you are having such an enjoyable time and don’t want it to end, so you lean against the car and keep talking.

Honestly, after the last few years, just that felt remarkable. Meeting new people with which you have something – anything – in common.

There is a joke that goes to the effect that nobody wants to talk about Jesus’ biggest miracle – that he was in his 30s and had 12 close friends. That hits closer than I want to admit.

I mean, I have friends. I even have close friends. People I click with on a cellular level. But most of them live elsewhere. A wonderful aspect of this current technological age is that I am incredibly close to people I no longer live in close proximity to.

But local friends are harder. I mean, on one level, this makes sense. If I have the entire online world to pull from, that is a wider pool to choose from than just my village is. I can pick and choose more selectively, tailor my interests, and find people with whom I have many levels of overlap, rather than just “We live within 2 miles of each other, and both grow roses.”

But is that amount of overlap enough? Before the Internet, when you moved away, you just lost people. They were gone, and then you made new friends in the new town. But now, you can keep your old friends forever.

Meeting new people has been hard the last few years. I 100 percent do not recommend moving to a new city just before a global pandemic happens. In retrospect, that was poor planning on my part. Even discounting the pandemic, meeting new friends seems drought with peril in these politically divided times.

The other day I met a new person, and we sort of clicked. In the parking lot, I crawled their Facebook feed, making sure they don’t support things I have spent my life working against. The relief I felt when I saw their Black Lives Matter post was palpable.

Another guy I know isn’t on Facebook at all. He told me it’s easier for him to like people when he doesn’t know much about their beliefs. I get what he’s saying, but I’m just not interested in having friends with whom I have to hide parts of who I am.

It’s complicated. And lonely.

I don’t know if any of these people at the garden party today will eventually become my friends. I sort of hope so. But even if they don’t, tonight felt nice all the same.

The Mentor

In the 1990s, I worked for about 18 months for a man who owned a number of businesses. He was in his early 50s then and was financially successful. He liked me a lot and was my first true mentor, and I learned a lot from him, including, ultimately, that I had no desire to be like him. But it would be a while before I knew that.

He was married to a beautiful woman who had been an Olympic-level track and field athlete. Together, they had a 12-year-old daughter who excelled academically and athletically. She went to a parochial private school, and in the summer, went to camps – basketball camps, soccer camps, baseball camps.

They lived outside of Memphis in a huge house on a golf course, and she volunteered and lunched, and he kept starting businesses. He had worked for FedEx in the early days and had cashed out with a bunch of stock which he parlayed into a number of companies – everything from cleaning supplies to service businesses to eventually, a bank.

Officially, my job was as a troubleshooter for his nationwide janitorial company – I went in to fix troubled accounts, which usually meant taking the clients out to eat and then firing half the employees. It got so that even the threat of my visit would turn troubled accounts around because the employees knew heads would roll if I showed up.

When he first taught me this technique, I asked how he knew which employees had been causing the problems.

“I don’t,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. They don’t speak English, so you couldn’t find out anyway. Just fire half of them, and the rest will be so scared they will do whatever you tell them.”

Fear, the mentor taught me, was an effective tool for getting people to do what you want. If that sort of thing is important to you.

He wasn’t a smart man, and he knew this. But he told me that what he lacked in brains he made up for in effort.

“There are people who are smarter than me. I can’t control that. But they can’t outwork me without my consent”.

He routinely scheduled meetings – especially unpleasant meetings or meetings with sales people – for 6 AM.

In fact, 6 AM on Monday mornings was when he would fire people, his rationale in those pre-internet days being that then they had a whole week to work on finding a new job rather than being fired on Friday at 5, and then you can’t do anything constructive until Monday and have the whole weekend to fester.

Many mornings the mentor would meet me at job sites at 4 AM and we would go visit accounts, then eat breakfast after the sun came up. He would tell me stories of business victories and drop bits of wisdom he thought I should know, and we would go over various things I was working on. My unofficial job was to be his sidekick and mentee – it filled a lot of needs for him at that stage in his life. I joked to my wife at the time that he paid me to be his friend. There was, it turned out, a lot of truth in that.

Once while eating breakfast, I told him that if I was as successful as he was, I would not be out at 4 AM looking at accounts. I would be in bed.

He laughed and said that part of the reason he was successful was precisely because he was the kind of business owner that checked on accounts at 4 AM.

“But you are in your 50’s”, I said. “You are successful. When do you get to sleep in?”

In six more years, he told me. He stabbed a piece of pancake and put it in his mouth, then pointed at me with the fork.

“There is a six-year plan.”

His daughter was 12, he told me. In six years, she would be 18, and then he would divorce her mother and cash out and retire.

“Truth be told, that’s the real reason I’m out here most mornings. I just don’t want to be home when my wife wakes up. If the choice is to make money or spend time with a woman I hate and a kid who hates me, well, that’s an easy choice.”

I was floored. He had every single status symbol I associated with success: A beautiful family, a nice home, lots of money, and control of his schedule. People feared him, respected him, and some of us wanted to be like him.

But all he had really done was build a life in which he was miserable and spent much of his time trying to pretend he wasn’t. I was reminded of Steven Covey’s comment about the man who climbed the ladder of success, only to find it was leaning against the wrong wall.

I can track so much of who I am now back to breakfast that morning in that diner. I wasn’t sure what I was going to be yet, but I was sure what I did not want to be – someone who sacrificed so much to build a life everyone envied, but from which they themselves wanted to escape.

A Dark and Stormy Night

It was a dark and stormy night.

I’ve always wanted to start a piece that way. Of course, I’m stealing it from Snoopy, who in his guise as a World Famous Author always began the story he was writing with those words.

In a more serious vein, Madeline L’Engle began A Wrinkle in Time with that line, although it is generally agreed that she was somewhat winking at the audience as she did it. It had already been a cliche for a long time by then.

But yet, right now, it IS a dark and stormy night. At least, it is here, as I sit down to write this.

Some days, the words just don’t come. As I sat down to write this, I just learned that there has been yet another school shooting, where 14 students and their teacher are dead. I don’t have anything to say about that. Even the standard platitude of “thoughts and prayers” is hollow, as there is something deeply hypocritical about praying for a problem you are unwilling to solve.

And that is just one example. A week ago there was a racially inspired shooting, where 10 folks died in the grocery store. And COVID has killed a million of us here in the US alone. And inflation is pinching us and lots of folks are barely making it and meanwhile, billionaires travel in space for fun.

I want to write an angry post right now. I would feel better, and you would share it and nothing would change except that my blood pressure would be higher. That sort of anger almost killed me once, and I’m no longer willing to sacrifice myself or my health to make people on the internet like me.

* * *

The air conditioner went out in my house yesterday. AC repairs always scare me, because most AC work requires specialized tools, and the repairs tend to be expensive and so when I need AC work done it stirs up fears around money and career choices I have made and drags up all of the old anxieties I had hidden away when life was going well.

Last night I sat on my deck (because it was hot and stuffy in my house) and heard frogs having a party in the new frog pond I’m building, and the sounds of frogs singing and the water bubbling soothed my anxieties and I slept a hard 7 hours, and woke up this morning to find frog eggs in my pond.

And then I went for my walk before it got hot, and I saw the flowers abloom and the neighbors waved and I came home and drank a cup of coffee made exactly the way I like it, and I sat on my deck and watched the water splash in the frog pond and I thought how fortunate I was, even if my AC didn’t work.

But then I called a man that someone in my network recommended, and he came out and fixed it quickly and it cost a mere $100 and I recognize that my community saved my bacon once again and I can leave my anxieties about money and careers and productivity on the shelf for now, to be examined later.

And that is where I am right now, on this dark and stormy night, enveloped by the pain of the world.

I believe it’s bad. I believe that our community can save us from all of this. And I believe we have to find the beauty and the joy that exists in the midst of it all if we intend to survive until it does.

The Bad News

It was perhaps six years ago that I found myself at the hospital. It was, to be fair, a nice hospital, as hospitals go. I didn’t have clergy credentials at this one – my people almost always ended up at the much less nice county hospital. But still, here I was – well, me and my buddy Shelden. He was good as gold, Sheldon was, but his missing teeth and unkempt afro garnered some stares from folks in the lobby.

Shelden had come to me earlier that day and told me that his brother was in the hospital with lung cancer. And then he asked if I would go with him to see his brother.

I said that of course I would, but that I didn’t even know he had a brother. Sheldon said something about his own brother had acted like he didn’t have a brother. I didn’t push it. When you don’t have a home, sometimes family dynamics get complicated.

The first clue that something was wrong was at the front desk when Shelden asked for his brother’s room number. The receptionist looked at the computer and then picked up the phone. A cryptic exchange happened, then she hung up and said, “You need to go to the nurse’s station on the fourth floor, they will tell you where to go.”

So we go off in search of the elevator. We get lost and wind up on the wrong elevator, and at the wrong nurse’s station. We ask for his brother’s room.

The nurse looks up the name, makes a bit of a face, and then picks up the phone. And that was when I knew this is not going to end well.

She sends us to the other end of the fourth floor, to the correct nurse’s station. Shelden starts that way, while I linger.

“He has passed, hasn’t he?” I ask the nurse.

She looks at me with sadness and nods, probably violating eight different privacy laws.

I take a huge breath and then hustle down the hallway to catch up with Shelden, who is shuffling along, head down. There are no rules in such a situation, other than to take care of your people. Actually, that is really just a good rule any time. Figuring that it’s better for him to hear this from me than a nurse, I stop him in the hallway and, for probably the 10th time in my life, I told someone who mattered to me that someone who mattered to them is dead.

The hospital staff had been watching us, and when Shelden broke down in the hallway, they were right there with a chair and a wet rag. They assured him his brother had gone easily in his sleep that morning. One, in such a scene that only happens in the South, told him his brother was “with the Lord now.”

Fifteen minutes or so pass, and we’re handed more wet rags and ginger ale and boxes of tissues and Shelden gets hugs from a few nurses. Then he looks at me and says, “Can we get out of this hallway?”

We go to the chapel to sit for a while. That’s the nice thing about hospital chapels – they are almost always empty.

Again – no rules. We sit. He cries, and at his request, I read “some stuff from the Bible.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. – Romans 8:37-39

He asked me what I thought that meant. I told him that it meant that there wasn’t a damn thing that could keep God from loving us. He nods.

We sit and time passes. A few more tears. Then he is ready to go. It’s almost dark as we walk to the car. I ask him where I should take him. He asks to be dropped downtown, where he can hang out until he finds out if he has a bed for the night at the shelter.

We stop at the big park downtown – the one that had the statue of an acorn in it – and we get out, the wind whipping at our cheeks. It’s not bitter cold yet, but it’s down in the fall and the wind makes it a little uncomfortable. I hugged him and told him I loved him, and that I want him to come by my office tomorrow and we will see what needs to be done about the arrangements.

And then he headed toward the bus station, hands in pockets, head hung low, and I got back in my car and drove home to get ready to meet friends for dinner.

Debits and Credits

When I was in my 20s and hated my job, I would sometimes hide in the casinos outside of Memphis in Tunica, MS. They were all still pretty new then, and it seemed fancy and exotic, and there were good shows at night and they were liberal with the comps.

As an aside, if you ever want to hide, or develop a drinking problem, casinos make excellent places to do it – you can get $30 of chips and bet sixes and eights on the pass line at the $5 craps table for hours and hours. They also bring you free drinks. If you wear a suit to work (as, say, an investment advisor), you can also wear it to the casino without changing. It may be different if you are a plumber, although the things you could get away with at a casino in Tunica Mississippi in the late 1990s would fill a book.

There was a man I knew at the casinos – we all just called him Mr. Daniel. He was a retired farmer, and he lived near the casinos, and he dressed like a retired farmer: khaki slacks, tan boots, a plaid shirt, and a baseball cap. He called the cocktail servers, all of whom were young and shapely and female-bodied, things like honey and darlin’.

Every day, he came to the casino and played craps. He arrived at 9:00 every morning, like clockwork. Like it was his job. He stood in the same place each time, and always ordered the same thing to drink- Diet Coke with a lime wedge. Every third drink, he tipped the server a $5 chip.

Mr. Daniel would show up every day and would always throw three $100 bills on the green felt, and say “Change Only” and take the $300 in $5 chips, and then he would play very safe bets, and when he had doubled his money he would quit for the day. Sometimes he was done by 10:30, and most days he was done by 2 PM, but still other days he was still there at 5 PM when he would quit for the day. If he ever got down by $100, and sometimes it happened, he would quit for the day. And either way, tomorrow morning he would be back at 9 AM with $300 and do it again.

If you figured he made an average of $150 a day, accounting for losses and weekends off and so on, he cleared more than 40K a year. Not bad for retirement money in the late 1990s.

I liked Mr. Daniel. He would talk to you if you asked him questions, and we sometimes would eat in the casino’s steakhouse if he was done for the day. The casino was just fun for him. He won more than he lost, but he was wealthy, and this was just a distraction from the sameness and boredom retirement was for him. As someone who was supposed to be trying to sell rich people things, I asked Mr. Daniel lots of questions.

A thing he told me was that most of life was just money management. Most of life, Mr. Daniel said, was just money management. Deposits and withdrawals, credits and debits.

I never got rich gambling. And no, I never got Mr. Daniel as a client, although I tried, hard. But the metaphor of debits and credits has served me well, especially when it comes to relationships.

We make deposits and withdrawals into our relationships with other people. I smile when you walk in? Deposit. I share something you wrote on Facebook? Deposit. I help you move? Big deposit.

We have a disagreement? Withdrawal. I ate all the chips and didn’t tell you? Withdrawal. I don’t show up for our lunch date? Withdrawal.

We all do this. We all have debits and credits with each other, and while we don’t keep score, per se, we all know the person who only makes withdrawals. We avoid those people. We get tired of them quickly.

The truth is, some people only withdraw. The guy who only calls you when he needs your help. The person who only critiques your work, but never affirms it. The guy who “just wants to play devil’s advocate.”

Those people are not automatically bad people. There are probably lots of accounts they routinely make deposits into. But that account they make deposits into isn’t your account. In your account, they are overdrawn.