Category Archives: small town USA

Sliding into Laughter

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After the intense emotions of the “Hazel Days,” it is with glee that I steal my friend Heather’s FB post and offer it here. Some of you may remember Heather as our bookstore cleaner who moved to Colorado recently. Her older son, Reese, is a solidly built lad of 11 (who has autism). I would have asked Heather to use this, but in their first week in their new house, they don’t have Internet access yet, except in one corner, stealing wifi from a neighbor for five minutes at a time. And she has to fight three healthy boys (including her husband) to get chair share time. Besides, it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission. (For those of you wanting news of Hazel, she has her own FB page: CLAN Hazel.)

And  now, heeeeeeeeere’s Heather!!!!

So…. we are in the pool at the local Y, where there are two giant twisty waterslides. Reese is doing his usual ‘go up to the top, sit down, think about going down, scream, stand up, go back down the stairs’ thing three times in 20 minutes. In a moment of what I NOW know was complete stupidity, I go up the two stories myself and suggest to David he go down the slide to show Reese what it’s like while I stay with Reese at the top.

STUPID. STUPID. STUPID.

Picture this: David is at the bottom of the slide yelling up to Reese how great coming down is. Reese and I are at the top looking waaaay down. I eventually coax Reese into loosening his death grip on the sides of the slide, but I can see that he is not fully prepared emotionally for what is happening, and begin to help him to the stairs when he is caught in the flow. He starts clawing like almighty hell trying to stop the inevitable. He slides down around a bend and tries to stand and … climb… back… up!

David and the YMCA lifeguard are now screaming for Reese to sit down, and we watch him slip to a point on the slide where we can no longer see him at all. He does not come down. The lifeguard motions for me to slide down, find Reese, and help him the rest of the way.

Let me preface this next part by stating that I do NOT like waterslides. In the least.

I grudgingly sit at the top of the slide and start down…

and quickly realize that this water is moving VERY, VERY FAST, and there is no freaking way on heaven or earth I can stop or even slow down. How the hell did Reese stop himself?

I fly around what I feel must be the twentieth bend (in reality there are 5) and there is Reese – standing on the slide against the water flow, gripping the sides, FACING me. I yell for him to hold on as I hit him full force. He lands on top of me, and we smash through the last three bends like wrecking balls to land in the pool, falling to the bottom with such force I swallow and snort what must be a third of the pool’s total liquid volume. I flail myself to the surface like a mad woman, believing my child is quite possibly drowning right in front of me (at the YMCA).

I come up sputtering and choking to find Reese standing in the pool with a look of total surprise on his face. He then slowly breaks into a grin and exclaims, “Oh, yeah!”

Oh, hell no. Never again. Never. Ever.

WHAT HAZEL DID

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HazelThe response to Wednesday’s blog on Hazel, the 20-year-old cat who bounced from the shelter to us, was overwhelming. Wednesday evening, I took my laptop into Hazel’s resting room to read her some of the emails and comments, but she was afraid of the laptop so I left. When I visited her a bit later, some of her food was missing.

I put out more food, and contacted Beth, our vet, and our friends David and Susan Hamrick, cat rescuers from way back. Both had suggested on Tuesday that Hazel be given Laxitome, in case her condition was trauma rather than tumor.

This involved dosing Hazel’s paw with the caramel-like stuff. I did. She gave me an incredulous look and limped stickily away. But when she reappeared that night, her feet were clean, so I knew she’d licked it off. No poop–then, or later on Wednesday, when I went back in sans laptop and told Hazel about all the well-wishes and prayers going up for her. She glared at me. I sat with her until her guard was down, blobbed her foot again, and left, feeling that I might be torturing rather than helping the old girl.

Next morning, her food bowl was empty. I put out more, again mixed with the Laxitome and sweet potato baby puree per Susan’s instructions, while Hazel glared from behind a pile of books. Jack, catching sight of her face, laughed.

“If she’s got that much piss and vinegar, she can’t be so close to death’s door any more,” he said.

“It’s not piss we’re looking for,” I riposted, but yes, we were both feeling the wee bit hopeful.

Because we had debated what every responsible pet owner does at these moments: what quality of life could Hazel, so clearly confused and sad and missing her family, reasonably get from our house? She doesn’t know us, and the bookstore is a bustling, barking-dogs, running-kids, Pony Express Outpost #6 kind of place. There are no quiet rooms with soft beds and familiar voices. Just us, well-meaning love at its most bungled and inept. Was it time to put her down, on the purple rug she’d claimed as hers, with a house call from our very compassionate vet (who’d already visited the bookshop to examine Hazel so she wouldn’t have to travel)?

No, said Susan, the cat whisperer. If she’s not in real pain, give the Laxitome a few days, and if Hazel is still alive Monday, David and I will come get her to live with us.

Normally I wouldn’t rehome a 20-year-old cat twice, but Susan’s house is a cat sanctuary. A haven. A refuge. Susan knows more about cats than just about anyone on the planet. Plus she sent a picture of Hazel’s new room.hazel's room

Bit of all right, in’it? There’s a window ledge with a low chair to help her reach it, so she can sit and look out at the garden.

We figured Hazel might have some QOL (quality of life) left if we could just get her to poop. Too much new, too little security, she was simply doing what cats do: protesting. And dying from it.

So her paws got gooped and her food got doctored (but she wouldn’t eat it) and well wishes got sent (and sweet-hearted Joe Lewis, my friend Elissa-the-photographer’s partner brought her a catnip fish and sat rubbing her chin until she purred) and on Thursday morning all her food was gone. I put out more. She ate it. By afternoon she was as cranky as… well, a constipated old lady. Brows furrowed, eyes squinted, you could just see she was working up to something big.

And Friday morning, I heard a meow from her room that turned the heads of all our dogs and cats. I raced down the stairs… and found a poop twice the length of Hazel’s body sitting on the pad next to the litter box.

The cat shat on the mat.

Hazel stood nearby, looking relieved. Heck, she practically looked postpartum. And when I turned to her, all praise and tears, she trotted away with a gait that said, “Put food in that bowl and get out. I know your tricks.”

I complied. And then I got on Facebook and shouted the good news. The only thing that stopped me photographing the evidence was my phone battery being dead.

Hazel will be taken by station wagon, in a mesh cat tent, with food and water dishes, a soft pillow, and a litter box, back to the Hamrick home, aka the Shady Rest Hospice for Distressed Gentlecats, where her quality of life in the weeks, months, or years remaining to her will be nothing short of splendiferous. We don’t know how long she has left, but we know she’ll be loved and looked after for all of it.

Yes, we’re all crazy. We should care half so much about social justice, about what happened with George Zimmerman and the Indian school poisonings, as we do about this “stupid cat.” Okay, sure.

But Hazel is doing much better. One starfish flung back into the ocean. It makes a difference.