Life..and Death

This one's not amusing. It's not cheery, but it's real.

A little more than 2 weeks ago a friend said his son had found a pair of kittens. They were newborns, eyes closed, barely able to move. For some reason they were covered with flies and fly larvae, maggots. Maybe their mother was injured or just didn't have the instinct to clean them and nurse them after birth, it's not known.

One was a beautiful grey color with a little white bib. In fact that color grey is fairly rare. I wanted him.The other was a white with black spots. If you squinted and turned it sideways you could see a Halloween cat with it's back arched. Sort of. He had a white chin and blaze on his forehead. I think that's what a stripe on the front of the head is called.
His ears were black on the outside and white inside.

Dave's step daughter Kim is a graduate of Bristol Agricultural school and knew just how to care for the tiny orphans. They were about big as a hamster, but they had proportionately large heads. Kim got kitten formula and a tiny baby bottle from Walmart and cleaned them up as best as she could. It's touch and go with kittens this little, without their mothers milk which contains colostrum they don't have the antibodies to fight disease and infection.
The grey one had been badly affected by the fly larvae. They had burrowed into one of his ears and created an infection. The white on was a screamer and seemed stronger. When the two of them started crying, you knew it. One article on raising kittens said, "A litter of kittens will sound like a band of tiny trumpets." The author was fairly accurate.

A couple of days after seeing the kittens I ran into Dave and Dee and they told me the grey had died. The ear infection was just too far advanced for the little guy to fight. Before anyone criticises them for not taking the kittens to a vet let me say that they have rescued more than 20 kittens and raised them or found homes for them. Our own Max was one of the most beautiful cats I have ever seen, off white with ghost tiger stripes and a ringed tail and blue, blue eyes. One of a pair of twins found seperately, strangely enough.

The next day I got a call from Lianne who said Kim wanted me to have the white one. I was ecstatic. I went right over and came home with a Pampers box lined with baby blankets, a carton of formula and the bottle and own tiny little trumpeter. "Meeeee, meee, meeeee!" he seemed to cry. Kim said they called him "Flower", like the skunk from Bambi. He did look like a skunk, the little stinker. I recalled that I had said to my sister that I'd like a black and white cat. That was about a month before. Better watch what you wish for!

Kittens open their eyes at 7-10 days, unless they are long haired, which means 10-14 days. A kittens eyes are always blue when they open. Although they haven't formed a pupil, so it still takes a few days more for their eyesight to begin. This one didn't open his eyes until 4 days after getting him, and he was a long hair. So he was less than 10 days old when I got the little critter. One oddity about this kitten was his front paws, the were relatively large and long. Not double pawed, though. Kind of like a monkey paw. Cute...and creepy at the same time.

The little guy would sleep 4-8 hours and wake up crying. About an ounce of warm formula would solve that. Somewhere along I decided that his name was Gus. Gusto. Gussie. Augusto. Yeah, sounds good.

The 1 year old cat we have now is named Will. He would sit out on the gas grill in the winter and shiver, but he wanted to stay out with Max whose thick white fur was fine for the cold. Chilly Willy just fit for him. Willy. G.Willy Chill. Willby. Mr. Willouhby. Will B. Rightback. OK, enough of the nicknames. But I thought yelling out the door "Willy! Gus!", sounded better than Flower. To each his own.

Gus was thriving by the 2nd week here. His ears finally stood up, another benchmark in a kittens development I learned. When he fed on the bottle his ears would wiggle back and forth. A sure sign he was getting formula. After feeding he needed to be burped. Really! Imagine burping a big headed hamster. As you place the kitten on your shoulder you hear tiny bubbles coming up, then a teeny, tiny burp. Then he purrs. As you hold him in your hands he turns over, so you can scratch his belly I thought. Actually he needs to have his genitals stimulated so that he can pee and poop.

Gus learned to walk in short time. He'd walk, or waddle all over the living room, exploring.

Thor, our miniature Fox Terrier seemed to like him. He was about the size of a squeaky toy, and made the same noise too.

Will wanted nothing to do with the newcomer. He would sniff at him and howl disapprovingly and walk off somewhere. We can work on that I thought.

About Friday, just under two weeks of being here and when Gus hit 3 weeks old, he developed a slight cough. I thought he had swallowed his formula wrong. Something to keep and eye on I thought. Around that time Gus was strong enough to crawl out of the Pampers box. Imagine the fat little kitten making his way over the box wall and climbing up the comforter, into my bed and finding my ear to scream directly into it. "Meeeee.Meeeee!" OK, it's only 4 a.m. Time to eat. Nothing seemed to keep him in the box after that. Books placed over the box were no match for little Gus. He'd defeat every roadblock I devised. Finally it was apparent that he needed bigger digs. A moving box!

The moving box kept him in his place but without the books he ended up on top of the blankets. He wasn't getting the warmth he needed. His cough got worse and Sunday morning I found him cold and limp. I picked his lifeless body up and stroked his tiny head. Those cute little ears that wiggled when he ate. But wait, his ear moved. I could hear a faint heartbeat as I held him to my ear.

I brought Gus into my bed, under the covers and held him in my hands, stroking his chest and gently blowing my warm breath over him. Eventually his monkey paws started to move, and an occasional gasp with a kick of his back legs gave me hope. Over the next two hours Gus eventually gained his steam and was fighting himself back to life. A tiny amount of warm formula got his belly warmer. Gus is a fighter!

He bounced back stronger than ever, but the cough persisted. He definitely needed antibiotics. His nose was starting to show discharge. I was afraid of dehydration and tried giving him warm water in the bottle, but he wanted none of that and shrieked at me for the real thing. He never noticed that I watered the formula a bit and we both felt better.
Monday morning I called Capeway Veterinary hospital and couldn't get in until Tuesday afternoon. "One more day," I thought, "easy beans."

Tuesday morning I woke up to find Gus cold again. This was worse though. His gasps were infrequent. I got a heating pad and wrapped a blanket over it with Gus on top. I stroked his little head and chest but the signs of hope I got last time never appeared. After 2 hours it was apparent Gus had died.

It was all very clinical. I covered him up and placed his body in his Pampers box. I shut off the fan that I had placed next to his box to keep a familiar hum near him. Like the mothers heartbeat. But I was supposed to be the mother. He lit up when I held him, he'd struggle to climb up my arm and sit on my shoulder and purr in my ear until it tickled too much to bear any longer. Kittens faces are almost flat when they're born. Their noses are there but the bridge of their nose, the snout is flat. Kind of an alien look with those big blank eyes.

For 2 weeks I had wondered if he would be ugly or beautiful. The black on his face seemed too uneven. Symmetry. That was lacking. Humans perceive facial beauty in symmetry. If a person's eyes are uneven or too close or too far apart one is less likely to be seen as beautiful. Most of the other facial features apply. Big nose, small lips, etc.

On Sunday I had decided that he was beautiful. No matter what he looked like. If my presence made him so happy that he wanted to purr in my ear, he was beautiful to me.

I had never liked cats, until a few years ago when I realized that cats liked me. Those cats that usually disliked strangers seemed attracted to me. I don't know why. Animal magnetism?

Some guy at Stop and Shop was stocking the shelves in the cat food aisle when he saw me trying to get the "right' can of food for Willy. He laughed and said, "It always suprises me to see you big tough looking guys buying cat food. Well, I was glad to be percieved as tough, it must have been my black jeans and Hot Rod T-shirt.

We lost 2 of our cats to coyote attacks in the spring. There have been more than 16 lost in a 3 block area. Max, the 1 year old beauty king and Scoop, my 8 year old female. Losing them was terrible, but I never felt like crying. Three week old Gus has me crying. I can't remember the last time I cried. Ten or fifteen years ago, maybe.

I guess it all just built up. I didn't start tearing up until I wrote this piece. Now I can barely see the keyboard. And it seems to be getting worse. I hate it when I lose control over that lower lip, it's the giveaway you're cracking.

I hope this wasn't too long and depressing. I just needed to write it.
Thanks for reading.

Ship Happens!

Well here's one for the books. Last Friday night I was sitting in the backyard, having a little fire in the backyard kettle when I got a call to go by a larger fire at a friends house. I was on what I thought was to be my last beer and my intent was to go in and get ready for the night.
Well, as I was explaining my intentions the caller hung up on me after declaring,"Every party has it's pooper and you're this one's."

I didn't mind being hung up on, but getting called a party pooper was just too much to bear. So I banked the fire and grabbed myself another beer and walked on down Littleneck St.
When I got there, there were 3 other people and a nice warm fire. Within a few minutes 4 more people arrived and slightly later, one or two more. In a short time we had about 10 people sitting in a nice ring around Sid's fire pit, well on the way to a good conversation.
As I was grilling John, sitting to my right, about the finer points of his being an extra in the Providence Irish Mafia based TV series "Brotherhood", someone asked what's that out in the water?

There was a light, apparently atop a boats mast, along with a bow light. I suggested it was a sailboat that was getting awfully close to the shore. In fact there is a sand bar and ledge that extends out in the area. Within seconds someone else stated that the sailboat was in actually a sport fishing boat. Within seconds of that, I said it looked like a 90 foot fishing boat. Suddenly the deck lights showed that it was indeed a very large boat within feet of the beach, about 500 feet south of us. They were practically in someones back yard, as beachfront rights go, of course.

Stacy ran down to the boat to see what the hell was going on. In a few minutes she came back and said "they don't know WHERE the hell they are." Shortly after that there were only 2 of us sitting at the fire, but we did see (but barely hear)the Martin's Prius go back and forth between the house and the beach 3 or 4 times.

Eventually some of the people who showed up at the beaching were Phil Lacerda of the Fairhaven Police, Beth David of the Fairhaven Neighborhood News and Eric Dawicki of Northeast Maritime Institute. Eric can be credited (and seen in the photo) with wading out waist deep and shouting instructions of how to free the Hilena M to the skipper of the boat, who by the way refused to throw down a ladder and from what I gather, spoke little English. Check out this Thursday's edition of the Neighborhood News for the real poop.

In these days of radar, depth finders and GPS, how the skipper of that boat missed the country's richest seafood producing port by a literal mile eludes my senses. Although it did happen before in 1932.
Never the less it provided a night of mild excitement and curiosity. In fact it spilled over to the next day. On Sunday afternoon Stacy 'rounded the troops, or should I say crew, for a New Bedford Harbor Boat Tour. Coincidentally, John who sat to my right at the campfire, was our boat's captain. John did a magnificent job, both piloting the craft in and about the fishing fleet docked at the various piers, despite my interruptions of useless information and questions. There was also an outbreak of 'International Talk Like A Pirate Day' leftovers.
Such as, "What's your favorite letter of the alphabet?"
"Arrrrrrr."
By the way I got to ride in Louise's Chrome Yellow Saturn convertible. A very nice ride with the top down on a sunny September Sunday. Thanks Louise!

The tour left from the wharfinger building on State Pier in New Bedford, where we parked our cars. The brick building is also the original home of the New Bedford Seafood Display Auction, which has been recently reintroduced. After the "3 hour tour...a thrrrree hourrrr tour", no it was more like an hour. As we were returning to the pier we went under Route 6, between Fish Island and the Crystal Ice building when John shouted, "Is that the Hilena M?" And lo and behold thar' the blue ship was!
All along the boat sat within eyesight and less than 100 feet from where we parked. Because it was berthed 4 deep at the pier we couldn't get close enough to place the "Neighborhood News" sticker Stacy had brought along. Several pictures were were taken of the stern and her name to prove our 'sleuthiness'.

What A Wild Summer 08/23/2008

The Summer of 2008 will go down in my book as one for the records. The people, the weather and the price of gas all were meteoric in scope.
Let's start with gasoline. Pour it over the oil industry, light a match and start over. I thought antitrust laws were in place to avoid debacles like Standard Oil and the early railroad monopolies.
In early August I saw some financial analyst predicting that gas would get down to $3.50 gallon. I laughed...for about a week. But, damn, he was right. Now a drop of $.50 per should make people happy, and that was the plan, I suspect. But at the same time last year we were paying $2.50 a gallon. On the flip side I have seen lots of small fuel efficient cars around lately, including a couple of Smart Cars.

Enough of the gas sitchy-ashun, let's hit on the weather. Man, was there weather. Wonderfully warm, almost tropical breezes. And there seemed to be a breeze all through July and August. We had rain often, and heavy at times, but never one of those spells where you wonder if we're living in Venice. A tip of the hat to Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes for the Venice comment.
Although we had a few days of widespread flooding, at least no drought Of course in Fairhaven a "outdoor water usage ban" was in effect. That meant you could only water lawns and wash your car on your trash pickup day. A week later
As of this writing there had been no tropical storms, or worse, a hurricane. In July we had a historical weather event. A TORNADO touched down in New Hampshire. In August a water spout was seen in Padanaram Harbor in Dartmouth. One week later a microburst hit Acushnet. Very freaky.
But man, this is WEATHER!

It's been very interesting to watch. On the day of the microburst I was a friend's house, right on the beach on West Island and we could see the wall of water and 40 mph winds racing across Little Bay, frothing up the sea into white caps five miles away. Note to self, put rain poncho on inside the house, rather fighting with it in 40 mph winds. It was wayyy more difficult than donning a hospital johnnie.
On to friends. I have met more Island people this year than ever before, and I enjoyed meeting them all. Apologies to Sid, who's name is not Luke and Keith who is not Brian. Friends from my teen years on West Island, Stacy, Nancy, Linda, Glenn, Scott and the spark of an idea to reunite more of us stirred up great memories. I even saw a picture of myself before I earned my pot belly. Note that I said earned. You don't just get a pot belly, you have to earn it. I find it a useful for placing a drink on and it prevents stains from reaching your shoes, although you can rarely see you feet with it.

50s night

I happened onto the annual 50's night in New Bedford's downtown one Thursday night and was thrilled at my find.
Portions of Union St., Pleasant St. and normally a section of Acushnet Avenue are closed off to allow classic and muscle cars to be displayed. Because of the unpredictable weather this year, some of the near concourse car owners decided to keep them home. Driving a show quality car in the rain just doesn't fly. There were plenty of cars that were drivers there though, about 100. Along with the cars were of people strolling through the cordoned off streets among vendors of hamburgers, cacoila and linguica sandwiches, balloons and T-shirts.

One of the notable cars in attendance was a 1951 GMC ambulance with an original 50,000 miles and owned by the city of New Bedford. One of 3 ever made, the city police department got theirs in 1952. State of the art for the time there was one major oversight when the ambulance was ordered, the bumper height didn't match the dock height at Saint Luke's hospital. The truck was retired to the New Bedford Municipal Airport as a crash vehicle where it stayed until the 80's when it was retired to parades and car shows. It has it's original gurney, stretcher and extrication equipment which was basically wooden splints.
For more information on AHA! nights in downtown New Bedford check out the link.

How to Drive Your Neighbor Nuts!(If you haven't already.)06/24/2008

For this article I'm going to call my across the street neighbor Dennis. That's because his real name is Dennis.
He'll like the notoriety.
Dennis keeps the best looking lawn in the neighborhood. That's because he's retired, quit drinking and has an Apple computer with AOL dial-up. So he has time to do things while the computer logs on. Like mow the lawn.
One particular week, for some reason, Dennis let the grass grow particularly long. He would normally mow it often, so that the clippings would not leave trail after the mower. This time the grass clippings were piling up after the riding mower like seaweed on the shore after a Sou'Easter.
As Dennis was piloting the mower around the back of the house I moseyed (I know how to mosey) in through the front gate of his neat white picket fence and sat on the side steps waiting for him to make it around the corner of the house to the front yard. Apparently I hadn't latched the gate and it was left in the open position. Just plain too lazy to mosey on back I left it.
As Dennis made his way to the front yard, along the fence, carefully watching how close he was to the fence, and monitoring his clippings trail he didn't even notice me on the stairs. He did see the open gate just in time to give it a little kick closed so the mower could slide on by. He made the next turn and roared into the back yard for another lap. Sitting there waiting for him to return to the homestretch I got an idea, I got up and opened the gate again.
After what seemed like an awfully long time (it's always an awfully long time when you're waiting for the payoff of a prank to happen) he finally made it back to the fence and as he neared the gate he gave it a double take and a snarl and gave it a swifter kick than before, made the turn to the back yard and still hadn't seen me on the stairs.
Well if something works good twice, three times has gotta' be the charm, so now buoyed by impish energy I got up off the stairs and opened the gate one more time.
Again Dennis came around the corner after what seemed an eternity, and cruised past the gate but this time he didn't give a kick.
That seemed to ruin the whole ploy. Until I got up and closed the gate. Curious as to his reaction this time, I waited on the stairs once more.
Again, he rounded the corner, neared the gate and I saw his gaze fixed on the gate and he stopped, staring at it. That's when I started laughing and moving about on the stairs and he finally saw me.
"I thought I was goin' crazy." he said, about the open- closed gate.
Dennis was the victim of another one of my pranks over a few days. His property has a large open yard next to the house with a workshop at the back of the yard. He backs his truck up to the shed to load and unload tools and materials there. To make it a little easier at night, Dennis bought some plastic orange reflectors on a stick to place in the ground to outline sort of driveway. Seeing this I gave him a few nights to get accustomed to backing in using them. Then I went over and moved them in a few inches closer one night. Then a few inches closer the next night. The third night I moved them several feet OUT.
The next morning when I looked out of the window I had forgotten about moving the reflectors but seeing Dennis' truck reminded me. Because he had gotten accustomed to them guiding him in the dark and me moving them outward they couldn't be see in his mirrors. The truck was parked nearly sideways in the middle of the field!
I ran into Dennis later in the day and asked if he had been drinking last night because of the way he had parked. Immediately he stiffened up and said, "Yeah, were you playing with my reflectors?"
Putting on my best confused look I asked "What are you talking about?"
"Oh, never mind", he said.
Later on I copped to the migrating reflector deal. Even though he was a little peeved he seemed relieved it wasn't just due to his driving skills.
I wonder what 2008 will bring?