So. This morning, puppy Shadow and I stopped into our nearby Petco, to replenish his 16-year-old body with daily vitamins. Or is he 17? Possibly. He’s old. Likely as old as I am, at 81, and supposedly aging faster. We walk three to four miles daily. Here he is, a few minutes ago, post-walk.
So this morning, on our return, we stopped in at Petco, a behemoth corporation . . .
. . . which, however, sources its in-store pet offerings (cats) from nearby Brown County Animal Rescue. Good for them! We got our friendly feral ferocious cat Tiger from Petco three years ago, and had no idea just what an astonishing archetypaal being he would turn into. We no longer have rats; even a rat terrier was afraid of the rats . . . here he is, sleeping on my bed this morning, after the usual frozen December night out on the hunt.
Petco also has a great place for grooming; the young women who work there are wonderfully kind and caring animal lovers.
My son Sean and I (he drove in on Christmas Eve from Colorado to visit with his still paralyzed brother Colin for two weeks) were out to dinner last night, when he suddenly remarked: “I don’t know how people who live alone do it without animals!” I agreed, wholeheartedly. Even when you don’t live alone, in this disconnected, increasingly chaotic former culture, animals connect us to our instinctive animal nature, so that we’re not just pie-in-the sky machine minds. He prefers dogs to cats. I like them both, equally. Cats demonstrate independence, and dogs demonstrate connection. As humans, we need both, if we are to have any hope of re-membering how to be ourselves while getting along.
Okay, all the above is to introduce a story from this morning’s visit to Petco. While there, I came across a woman, middle-aged she appeared, who had stopped by a watery, glassed in realm, and was communing with its ever-curious turtle. I stopped to ask if she knew where the dog vitamins were. She did not, but was waiting for a clerk to come back with crickets, which she needs for her juvenile bearded dragon.
“Wow! How long have you had your baby bearded dragon?”
“Got it just last Friday. And, I’m going to pick up a baby python tomorrow evening . . .”
“Geez.”
“And they both better get along with my dog and two cats . . . not to mention the six cats my housemate has . . .”
But, about face! Then she told me she’s moving out of that house in two days — with her dog, baby bearded dragon, baby python, and “getting rid of the cats.”
(Me, in my mind, surprised: “Does she really disrespect cats? The language she uses makes it seem so.”)
Me, out loud: “And do you have a place to go?” — assuming she did!
“I’m working on it” . . . she says, cheerfully, as if no big deal, on this sunny, very cold, late December day in the northern hemisphere of planet Earth.