Menu
At random
For forty years now, Ginny and I have rescued small animals from starvation, dogs from the pound, cats from starvation, tropical fish from the toilet, pigeons from city-dwelling hawks, and mice from the family cat. But I want it understood from this point forward: the Nash household is not taking in any more stray four-legged or two-legged critters.
This personally humiliating habit began in 1964, when Ginny and I, one evening, walking back to our first apartment from a movie in Kew Gardens, Long Island, came upon a pigeon loping down the sidewalk. As we approached him, he stepped up his pace, but didn't take flight .
| He just began walking very fast. Overtaking him, I bent down and picked him up. He'd obviously broken his wing. What should we do with him? Why, take him up to our nearby apartment, of course |
Next morning, I notified the ASPCA, then called my boss.
| "Joe, I won't be in this morning; I have to watch after an injured pigeon until the guy from the ASPCA shows up. He has a broken wing." |
| "Oh, for God's sake, Charley, why don't you put the bird out of its misery and come on in? It's shaping up to be a very busy day." |
| Following the pigeon from the kitchen, where I'd left him the night before, to the living room,, I noticed he had somehow jumped up on our new couch, left a white memento on the fabric, and plucked numerous threads from the upholstery |
* Twenty -some years ago, here on Spring Street we took in a license-free stray dog who we found one morning sleeping fitfully on our front porch swing. I named him Cleveland because he was equal parts white and black, gave him some water and dog food (left over from our recently run-over border collie), and made him an integral part of our family. We took him to a veterinarian (no longer now among the living), who assured us that Cleveland had already been vaccinated against distemper.
| Gosh, that was a relief! But guess what? |
We'd no sooner got Cleveland his license and got accustomed to his squirrely way of doing things; no sooner laid in a 50-pound bag of dog food, than he went into convulsions and died on our front porch.
Jessica, of course, was traumatized. How do you explain to an 8-year-old why each of her pets had died within a month of her receiving them? She was beginning to believe they all had expiration dates issued at the time of their birth.
* And then, there were the cats Groucho and Meow Tse-Tung. We picked up Groucho from the construction site of Main Hall when it was renovated. It was a pretty little cat, with a fetching fur collar like part of an Elizabethan costume.
When we brought it home, Jessica promised to be responsible for its maintenance, and she was as good as her word. He early developed the habit of sitting in the window seat of our front window, and of jumping up on our fireplace mantel, where he had the bad habit of whisking onto the brick hearth below everything he could manage. One evening he looked me in the eye, then whisked Ginny's 19th-century porcelain doll off the mantel and shattered it into a million pieces.
After I stopped Ginny's tears, I swore I would get rid of Groucho.
| Days later, a friend of the late Juanita Williams, who rented our house directly across Spring Street, looked out Juanita's front window and into ours. There, she found Groucho sitting in our window seat. | |||
| "Oh, Juanita, come look! There's the prettiest cat in the house across the street. How I'd love to own it." | "Well, as a matter of fact," Juanita replied, "I don't think it would be much of an effort to persuade the Nashes to part with it." | Indeed not! | We gave Groucho to this cat-fancier-together with what was left of a 50-pound bag of cat food. We never saw that particular cat-fancier again. |
* Meow-Tse Tung was another small cat. But he was born wild and remained wild for as long as he lived. Jessica rescued had him when he was very young.
| He'd been hit by a car down on Osage, and had crawled under the framework of a car parked in Ramey's parking lot. Jessica had seen the whole spectacle, and rescued him. As he grew accustomed to the family and house on North Spring, he took a shine to Ginny-and to no one else. Not even his rescuer. (Ungrateful little wretch!) |
We offered him a kitty litter box, but he preferred a carpet, any carpet on the first floor.
| He was a fleet little bugger, and no one could catch him when he didn't want to be caught. |
By the time he died-and he passed away by simply keeling over from the couch onto the livingroom floor-he'd ruined the carpet in the first-floor bathroom, the family room, and was starting on our bedroom carpet, when the Lord of Good-Housekeeping took him Home.
Astro, Jessica's big black cat, had died earlier and rests, the place marked by a black gravesite marker, in the garden in the back yard.
He was the last pet we had.
Did I ever tell you about Jessica's box turtle that we saved from extinction on South Spring?