Rthr the deaf cat and Dolly the calf

A few days ago I reminisced with my sister, Aimee, about our childhood. We had a good long talk about all these stories we want to tell but are concerned that, while they make good fodder, they may also make people uncomfortable. As you can see from all the blahbittyblah up ahead, I opted for "good fodder."

For example, a good story might be ....(struggling to think up good story)....oh yes, about Aimee's deaf cat Rthr. (Aim had a knack for odd names.) Rthr was a pretty cool cat. Aimee and Mom discovered him one day in an alley. Shortly after his discovery, a fire alarm went off directly above Aimee's head. Aimee jumped and covered her ears but Rthr didn't move. In fact, he kept on purring.

He was a medium sized lanky cat, white, blue eyed and had half a kinked up broken tail. I used to pretend his tail was one of those wind up things you see on the front of antique cars. Winding him up with a "wow wow wow" sound always made Aimee upset so I did it as much as possible.

If he thought he was abandoned in the house, Rthr would scream these awful howls and we'd have to flail our appendages wildly until he saw us or bang our feet on the floor until he felt the vibration. The first time he screamed we thought he was hurt but no, he was just alone in the kitchen.

Rthr had a good life on the ranch. A life filled with happily sitting on the road while being honked at by log trucks, catching hummingbirds in the horse trough near the honeysuckle bushes and laying in the green grass in the warm summer sun. Yep, it was a good life for Rthr, a loving, good natured, cooler than cool cat. Thankfully, we never knew what happened to him. He just disappeared one day.

A bad story would be about the time that Grandpa decided he wanted to shoot one of the bears eating blackberries in our backyard (it was a big back yard, we lived in the mountains). While preparing, he told a bunch of old-timey bear stories and got himself all wound up. I say old-timey because we have no way of telling if they were true and besides, his nickname is Banjo. 'Nuff said. As he told his stories, his eyes got bigger and bigger by the minute. It was hard to not get sucked into his tractor beam eyes which bulged out in a cartoonish manner.

Anyway, Aimee and I went out to put away the goats (Brandy, Mo and Rambo) and pet calf (Dolly) when we heard a gun shot. Long story short, Grandpa went outside early (hello, the grandchildren were out attending to the goats!) and shot at what he thought was a bear. How he mistook a red and white calf for a bear, I do not know. He didn't kill her or anything though. Just put a bullet through that fatty area near her wind pipe and set up an infection.

I don't really remember what all happened after that. I put up a big wall around that memory, it still makes me sad. Let's just say it ended a couple weeks later with us receiving a load of packaged meat with the words "Not to be consumed by the penicillin sensitive" stamped on them from the meat packaging plant. Aimee and I used Sharpe's to draw fun little pictures of cow faces with eye-lashes on the white freezer paper along with "Dolly's burger" or "Dolly's back strap" before throwing the packages into our huge deep freezer. Yes, we ate her. We were poor.

Life doesn't care about your feelings, what's fair or what makes you uncomfortable. If you can't poke fun at it and laugh, you'll just end up bitter and depressed. At least, that's what I learned.