Wednesday, November 11, 2009

The tooth fairy comes up empty handed.





The dental fairy comes for Sally Cookie’s teeth. They are not to be found. Sally wakes me up and asks, quite angrily for her, “Where are they?” I say the vet offered them, but I said no. They were diseased; I didn’t want to save them. Was this unsentimental of me?

She shakes her head; once again I have failed her.  “The tooth fairy was going to leave me a live mouse and a yellow parakeet under my pillow in return for the teeth. I was looking forward to it.”

“I had no idea,” I say sadly. And then I remember I have her x-rays. I rummage around in the drawer. “Will this do?” I say handing her tiny x-ray with 5 or 6 images of what looks like stalagmites, the decision will be handed down next month… I’ll let you know.

The back-story.  Last year every time I took Sally C. into to see her old vet, the vet would look in her mouth and say, “I can hardly look in there. It’s awful.” Once she invited me to take a peek. I nerved myself up and looked. Something that appeared to be an open wound was visible at the back of her mouth. But we agreed that Sal was just too fragile to go under anesthesia.

The new vet and I discussed the problem. He said she’s stage 4. I wondered, why is cat dental surgery suddenly so popular? I suspect a new and reliable source of revenue, but then I remember the inside of her mouth. 

He takes many blood tests and urine samples and pronounces her sound enough to go under. The procedure takes 3 hours and every one of her teeth.

 It’s been a week since the surgery. I am concerned. It’s so difficult for her to eat that she has lost interest in food.

I heard that in the old days when people had all their teeth removed their gums became so hard that they could eat an apple without any difficulty. Is that apocryphal? 

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Other Stories of Stolen Cars

I asked people on Facebook to tell me their stolen car stories. Here they are. Thank you!

MARGO'S STORY: You pay extra for car insurance in San Francisco because no matter where you live the insurance companies know that at some point your car will be stolen. Mine was — from Russian Hill — twice. Found both times not so far away, on the street, in the Tenderloin.

The cops told me that Hondas were the easiest cars to break into, so car thieves loved to break in to keep their hand in. To deter them, my friend Gary devised a little red light on the dashboard that stayed on but was not connected to any real alarm system. The thieves were not fooled: they ripped off the car, left it in the usual place, and to show their contempt, pulled out the red light and left it on the driver’s seat.


CLARE'S STORY: Here's my story (happened to a friend of mine, name changed). Harold's car was stolen, and he was especially upset cause he was in the midst of remodeling and had a lot of tools in the trunk. Surprisingly, he got it back about 10 days later — and there were *more* tools in the trunk than were his! He came out ahead actually. Amazing.

LAURA'S STORY: I decided to go out with some friends (I was 18 at the time and that's what we did). I got home and one of my parents' two cars was gone. Knowing it was having problems, I assumed it was at the shop. When I got up in the morning, the police were at my house because the car had in fact been stolen.

Apparently, about 15 minutes before I got home, our dogs were going crazy so my step-dad sent them to the basement. They were still young dogs and he thought they were just playing. He then went back to bed.

The police officer asked if anything was missing and apparently the perpetrators took the keys to the car off the decorative key-holder in our kitchen, and also took a large, sharp, kitchen knife.

If I had come home 15 minutes earlier, I would have been met by two men, armed with a knife, intent on stealing our car. The car was later found, intact but trashed, in Englewood, NJ.

I know you were looking for short and witty, but I send you this hoping you'll count your blessings.

Monday, November 2, 2009

Stolen Car Stories


I live in Chicago where 40 cars a day are stolen.

Last week my adorable red Toyota was one of them. Stolen from the back yard parking space between 6:00 and 8:30 P.M. I know the time because when I went downstairs the next morning, my neighbor was parked in my spot.

I squinted again and again trying to turn his big dark blue Scion into my tiny red Toyota, but no luck. I walked around the block just in case I had lost my mind and misplaced my car. Nope. My neighbor’s wife walked around the block in case I had lost my mind. Nope.

Regretfully, I phoned the police. The policemen took my report and told me a dreadful story about the gang rape of a young girl in California and added: “Be glad you weren’t there when they stole the car.” Then he asked how old I was. When he realized we had grown up in the same era he said: “When we were young, people gave pregnant women their seats on the bus, the world has gone downhill and will only get worse.

Right I thought, the good old days... so great for women and blacks and gays and etc... a more civilized time indeed! But I kept decorously quiet. At the end of our amiable, somewhat bleak conversation he said: “Buy a gun”

The next day another detective called to say that after my car had been abandoned, it was set on fire and then towed to impound.

I told my stolen car story to a few friends and was surprised to find that absolutely everyone had a stolen car story. It’s a rite of passage, like having a bad time at the prom, so I thought: Let’s hear it!

If you would like to send me your stolen car story. Please do, but make it a bit shorter. I was too long-winded, but telling the story felt good and now I don’t need to ever tell it again!

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Mysteries with and without cats

Mysteries and Cats



Sally was wondering just when I would get around to researching mystery novels with cats in them.

“Well, Sally” I said, “I have read a few and sad to say they are just a great big disappointment, with cats thinking convoluted thoughts and solving mysteries and being so cute one could retch.” Sally nods.  She knows that the beauty of cats is that they think simply and clearly and cut to the heart of the matter. Cute is like less than nothing to them. Sally allows that I can give up on finding mysteries and head for well-plotted novels with good writing and surprising twists and turns.

 In that vein I recommend Ann Patchett’s; The Magician’s Assistant, which has a wonderful opening line: “Parsifal is dead. That is the end of the story”…. a contender for the best opening line of a novel, previously held (in my mind at least) by “This is the saddest story ever told”, the fist line of The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford. The novel goes on to spin a tale that has many layers, all of them absorbing and beautifully written. It seems that Parsifal concocted his entire childhood. His true history is  revealed when his mother and sister show up after his death.

 Yes, of course there is a rabbit involved. He has a job as rabbits do in the magic act and is a member of the family… he is loved and watched, so that he doesn’t take a dip in the pool thinking he can swim. Sally has just shuddered at the very thought of water.

Other books by Ann Patchett: Run and Bel Canto for which she won Pen/Faulkner award and the Orange Prize.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

How's Sally Doin'?

Everybody asks about Sally Cookie. "How’s Sally Cookie doin'?" They ask quietly, suitably funereal in demeanor and voice. They know she has a condition and besides she looks very thin and appears to be one step away from death.

So I start my litany which I try to keep brief. "I've tried everything. Budesonide, Prednisolone, Leukeran, Centrine, B12 shots... special canned food from the vet and nothing works," and my voice trails off. My neighbor says meditatively, "Well you know people also have irritable bowel syndrome and it’s really a food allergy... an allergy to gluten." "And," she continues, "I think you should go see Tom at Sam and Willy’s because he knows a lot about gluten allergies."

So I do, because I would go anywhere for Sally, but luckily Tom’s store is nearby and we remember each other from Mojoes café where he was always on the outside looking in because his dog could not tolerate other dogs. So he would stand out in the cold and wait for Missy, his wife, to have her coffee and come back out. He thinks Sally is allergic to gluten and I should try feeding her a diet of raw meat, (which comes frozen in rather exotic flavors: Venison, Duck, etc) and he gives me a free sample.

Raw meat is something I don’t care to look at and initially I handle it with rubber gloves and my eyes closed, but I love Sally and so I buy these medallions which I have to mix up with a little baby food and water and she seems to find it as tasty as those mice she used to be agile enough to catch, not to speak of my darling spice finches.

I don’t buy raw chicken because Tom suggests that she may have developed an allergy to the kind of meat she ate all the time. In her case this would be Fancy Feast chicken and turkey.

Anyway, in two days she is cured and starts putting on weight and although I was very fond of my vet, it appears that she had never heard of cats being allergic to gluten and I think perhaps she should have done more research before suggesting acupuncture and the possibility that Sally had cancer and before I started redecorating my deck for Sally’s last goodbye. Although now the deck is so nice that I invite friends over for dinner, and Sally herself loves to catch a few rays out there.

So I find myself at a new vet, a man who seems to read everything and wants to share his knowledge and I am getting cross-eyed from the shear volume of it, when Sally walks over to me jumps up on a chair and pokes me with her paw... the universal signal for "get me the hell out of here" and even the vet laughs.

The beauty part of the new vet is that he is 1/2 block down from 90 Miles Café, a Cuban restaurant with the best lechon sandwiches I’ve ever had and, more importantly, really fine con leche coffee.