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April 15, 1998
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Todays' starting pitcher: Brian Rose Today's reading: A Trail Through Leaves: The Journal as a Path to Place by Hannah Hinchman
Today's weather: gray and cool in the morning, clearing in the afternoon, sudden onset of fog in the early evening along the coast Is wet laundry a sub-life? It's certainly becoming a theme. The first thing I noticed when I walked in the door of the cat shelter this morning was a huge pile of wet towels and pillowcases on top of the dryer with a note on it: "to be dried". Evidently the Tuesday night shift got backed up and had to leave wet laundry for us. Roberta had already put some stuff in the dryer so I put in a wash, figuring we'd catch up as the morning went along. Nope. The more I washed, the bigger the pile got. The dryer kept running, and when it stopped the contents weren't' dry because the load was too big. Arrgghhh! I think the wonder new washer has created a side effect - loads too big to be dried in 40 minutes. In between piling up wet laundry, I did the usual washing of dishes and litter boxes. Two giants came in looking for weebles. Turns out Weebles is a female cat in heat who didn't come home last night. The two extremely large women wanted to know if any cats had been brought in since last night. I told them no and suggested they call animal control. They didn't know what animal control was, so Bob and I explained that it was part of the police department that dealt with animals and that if any cats had been picked up, they would know about it. Then the larger of the two started saying how people go around at night and kidnap cats and sell them to labs and cat meat restaurants and torture them and her fantasies got wilder and wilder while I kept trying to tell her that we didn't have Weebles and she should call the police. A word on how large these women were. Both were well over 6 feet tall and outweighed me by a considerable amount. It's not just that they were fat - I'm fat, that's no big deal - they were tall, very tall and very large. One of them was dressed in overalls and looked like she'd stepped off the set of hee-haw, which added to the strangeness of the encounter. They didn't take my word that we had no new cats. They looked into every cage and commented on how much each cat looked like or didn't look like Weebles. They kept asking what they should do next and I kept telling them to call animal control and they kept asking what that was. This conversation happened at least 5 times. I lost count. They wanted to leave their names so we could contact them in case Weebles showed up, but they don't have a phone. Aha. That's why they can't call the police. But how are we supposed to contact them if all we have is a name? Bob explained again about animal control and how they should check other shelters. I stopped listening. The shorter one started in on how they hadn't gotten Weebles "spaded" because they wanted her to have kittens so she'd have them. I don't even pretend to know what that meant. Turns out they hadn't gotten any of their cats "spaded" until after the first litter. And they have lots of cats. They're moving to a place with more room for cats, maybe 50 or so. I hope the new place has a phone. Bob was the lucky one who got to do the cages of the two cats who have ringworm. He put on this green surgical gown that barely went around him. All the lab coats and gowns are size small. Most of us are not small. Bob looked particularly ridiculous. When he put on his gloves, Roberta and I cracked up.We started paging "Dr. Bob to the Ringworm Ward, stat". Betty, from the board, came in with some new dishes - the small plastic ones we use for the wet food in the morning. I made the mistake of thanking her and saying we needed them because I'd just had to throw out two more broken dishes. Well, I got a lecture on how a crack does not mean it's broken, and how to push the ends of the broken part back together so we can keep using them, and how the volunteers (ie. me) break them by throwing them in the sink or tapping the spoon on the side of the dish to get the food out instead of scraping it with another spoon (do we have another spoon?). And on and on. The line that got me was "They cost 10 cents each! We have to be more conservative with them!" 10 cents? Silly me tried to explain how the dishes really were broken and really needed to be thrown out - they could hurt the cats and spread diseases - cracked plastic is impossible to clean and bacteria love to reproduce in it. If you want to spread feline acne like wildfire just serve everything in cracked plastic dishes. Why did I argue? Guess I'll have to change my name to "Breaks Plastic Dishes on Wednesday". Domino got adopted since I was there last. So the windowsill was free for Jaguar to enjoy. The woman who is supposedly interested in Jaguar has not materialized yet. I guess she's kind of like the new Wednesday morning volunteer Stacy promised us all last year. Every Wednesday this woman who had just gotten out of a mental hospital was going to start working with us. Every Wednesday came and went without her. I stayed until nearly 2:00PM because we were shorthanded and Dawna was alone cleaning the sick room. I had to wait for her to get me all of the sick room dishes and litterboxes. All the while, I ran loads of wash and the occasional load in the dryer finished. Bob took two bags of wet stuff home to dry. I took three huge plastic garbage bags to the Village Tub and filled two dryers. I put in enough quarters to last 49 minutes and headed to the Tannery Cafe for a lunch of panzanella . Lunch at the Tannery didn't take up the whole 49 minutes so I browsed at Jabberwocky next door - one of my favorite bookstores and came away with A Trail Through Leaves: , from which I got the sub-lives quote at the beginning of this entry. I took it back to the Village Tub and read while I waited for the dryers to finish. A TV in one corner was playing one of the soaps - I don't know which one and I wasn't really watching.All of a sudden a woman's' voice shrieks "I deserve a better life!" so loudly that I thought it was someone at the Village Tub. It took me a second to realize it was the TV. Shortly after than the dryers stopped. A few things weren't dry so I put them back in one of the dryers and started folding the dry stuff. When I had it all dry and folded I piled it into the car and drove back to the shelter only to find out that my key doesn't work. I haven't had to let myself in lately, so I wasn't aware that anything had changed. So there I am with all this laundry and it's only about an hour until the evening shift comes on and Martha comes to supervise adoption hours, so it is pointless to go home and come back. Instead I decided to look for birds. I drove over to the boat ramp, then to Joppa Flats. I spotted a killdeer near the refuge entrance road, but the best sighting was a beaver at Joppa flats. At first I could only see a round lump of disheveled fur in exactly the same shape as a miniature salt marsh hay stack. It wasn't until it moved that I was sure it was alive. Finally it went about swimming and diving and slapping its tail so I was sure it was a beaver. This creature was far from any beaver dam and I didn't think of the Merrimack River as beaver habitat, but there it was. I watched it for a long time before returning to the shelter and putting away laundry. There was more wet laundry piled up waiting for the dryer and I was about to take another load to the Village Tub when a wave of tiredness washed over me and I thought better of it. By this time it was almost 5:00. Martha pulled in to start adoption hours just as I was leaving. I asked her if she could put some wet laundry in the dryer if she wasn't too busy with adoptions. When I got home, I fell into a half sleep during part of the ball game. I dreamed the beaver had dammed the mouth of the Merrimack River with a new kind of dam made of salt marsh hay instead of logs. I guess even in my dream I knew there weren't enough trees around there for it to gnaw on. I did manage to wake up enough to hear the Red Sox win in the bottom of the 9th again. Troy O'Leary drove in the winning run. |
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