I was early for my appointment to discuss illustrating a book on Hot Dogs... Vienna Hot dogs...Vienna hot dogs at a picnic. I was an illustrator before I became a cartoonist. I loved drawing hot dogs in buns, not much call for it then or now, so I was pleased to be offered this opportunity.
I was sitting all alone in a huge room, two stories high with a winding staircase. I had been buzzed in and told to wait. I was calmly looking around feeling relieved as I always did when I actually found the address that I was looking for with a modicum of angst and was safely seated. It was obviously someone’s private apartment, someone who was highly successful in Public Relations, someone who could afford a two-story place on Cedar Street in Chicago.
I heard a clanking noise behind me and I turned my head slightly to look at the stairway and I saw a cat. A cat that had two front legs and two wheels where her back legs should have been. She was coming downstairs. She had no trouble making her way. She moved with aplomb. Her owner followed her explaining that her cat had had an accident. But she didn’t go into the details.
Probably she had talked about the accident many times. It’s not like a child. People might hesitate to ask: how did your child come to lose her legs and how did you arrive at the decision to use wheels? The cat on wheels was another sign that I was in the home of a highly successful woman who had no financial need ask herself can I afford to amputate my cats back legs and replace them with wheels ? Or “ is my cat’s quality of life diminished by her locomotion? Is her life full of fun, spiritually rich”?
Sally has four legs, but she gets around on them awkwardly. I look at her. She purrs. She studies the height of everything before she jumps…and then she makes it look easy. Except when she misses, but don’t we all miss once in a while?
