Strange Days, Indeed

Note: It has taken me four days to get enough privacy, peace, and quiet to complete this post. This having-roommates thing ain't no joke.

I don't know if I've become more of a softie as I age, or whether depression or the medication used to deal with it are making me "girlier" or what, but I simply can't stand much of what's happening in the world. And I don't just mean people hurting each other--that, at least, gives me something to get angry about!--but even just plain old Mother Nature at work has become hard for me to swallow. I can't stand to hear about animals dying--particularly cats!--and so this pet-food recall has been making me completely nuts. I've never fed my guys anything but Cat Chow, but who's to say that Purina won't be the next brand added to the recall? Accordingly, I've spent the past hour researching the extensive topic of What To Feed Cats If You Don't Want To Give Them Commercial Cat Food Anymore. It looks, just from the initial reading I've done, that I'm gonna be chopping up a lot of raw chicken and entrails. Which, eewwww, but I'd rather wrestle chicken-guts than have anything happen to my kits.

See, although I've always been a cat-person, I've discovered that pet-relationships differ in degree of intensity. Ever since LJ's friend brought Snickers into this house, I have been the Original Paranoid Cat-Mother. In fact, I'm going to have to concede a hard fact here: I am now one of Those People, though I try very hard to repress it in public; privately, however, I treat my cats like children. I even remember their birthdays (though in BadCat's case, I've had to approximate, since he came from a shelter; Snick, on the other hand, celebrated his first birthday yesterday by taking an extended nap under my bed, then playing "string" with Tim. And in further proof of how much I am really one of Those People, I actually told several people yesterday that it was my cat's first birthday. I disgust myself.)

The upshot of all this is, every time I read about a sick cat, or a cat who's died, it makes me sad. Even if I don't know the owner, even if I don't know the cat, it makes me tear up a little. I am such a total wuss. And even though I'm biased in favor of cats, I do have the same sort of sensitivity about other animals as well--which is what makes this next story so infuriating to me.

Last week, on Thursday, my mom got a phone call from our across-the-alley neighbor's daughter, who was watering the plants while her parents were out of town. "You're going to think I'm crazy," said the daughter, "but I have to tell you something." And she proceeded to relate the following:

Last Sunday afternoon, she said, she was in the backyard when she heard a car driving down the alley. It stopped, and she saw three or four men in it; one got out of the car, holding a large object. The men looked to be in their 20's, she said, and the one with the object placed it in my mother's yard, looked around, jumped back into the car, and sped away.

The object, as the neighbor's daughter discovered when she want to investigate, was a large cage containing a very pretty, healthy-looking white-and-brown rabbit. The neighbor's daughter wasn't quite sure what to make of this, but she must have assumed that there was some arrangement for this rabbit to be dropped off at my mom's, and so she thought nothing more of it til Thursday morning.

Thursday, when she returned to the house again, she looked out the back door, which overlooks my mom's yard--and the rabbit cage was still there! At that point, she went into the house and called my mother, to let her know that she had apparently been the victim of a drive-by rabbitting. My mom went out to investigate, and lo and behold--cage and bunny, somewhat less happy now but very much alive, are sitting in the shadow of her garage. It was at the only point in the yard that can't be seen from the back door, and since she lives alone, Mom hadn't had an occasion to take out the garbage between Sunday and Thursday--which is the only other way she would have seen it. Sunday and Monday had been warm, but the rest of the week had been cold and rainy, and the poor rabbit had been out there in the elements all alone. Needless to say, the rabbit had eaten any food that had been left in the cage, and the water bottle was empty--but here's the kicker: Whoever dropped this rabbit off, had also dropped off a full, unopened sack of rabbit food along with him, in a plastic bag next to the cage.

Mom brought the bunny into the garage and gave him food and water, and called back the neighbor's daughter, who'd told Mom that if the bunny wasn't hers, she had a friend who would take it in. Mom said she'd be happy to pass the rabbit along to a good home, and Friday afternoon the friend came to pick up her new pet from my mother's garage. (They promised to name the rabbit after my mom, which will be funny if the rabbit's a male; talk about a boy named Sue!)

Which leaves me with the question, despite the happy ending: Who the hell takes their pet rabbit in a very nice cage, drives it off, and abandons it, randomly, in the backyard of a total stranger? I mean, in this case, the rabbit got a good home--but what if nobody had seen him? Or if nobody had wanted him?? Wouldn't it have been better to take the poor animal to a shelter or a vet's office, to give him up for adoption rather than just trusting to the kindness of the stranger whose backyard you've picked? In fact: who would just abandon a pet like that???

Meanwhile, in another backyard in a very different part of the city...

When Mom called on Friday, to tell me that the rabbit had been picked up, I would imagine she might have found me rather...distracted. Not that I wasn't interested--I just had a lot on my mind. Apparently, getting hired to a new job brings down the Clouds of Undue Weirdness upon my home and all who live there...

I shall explain.

When LJ came back from out of town, he brought with him a friend, who apparently unloaded some items into my garage, with LJ's permission. (I will identify these items only as "sacks of potatoes"; at the very least, the items were vegetable in origin.) I had also given permission, albeit in a roundabout manner; I was under the impression that the potatoes belonged to LJ, and that the quantity was very small. As it turned out, neither of these beliefs were correct.

Inasmuch as the garage is not very sound, structurally speaking, I have very little property stored there, nothing valuable, and so I have almost no reason to go out to the garage unless I'm looking for the lawnmower or a rake. And so on Friday, when Tim opened up the curtain of his bedroom to let the cats sit in the window and get some air, I was surprised to hear him ask me, "Hey, G--did you leave the garage window open?"

"No," I said.

"Do you think LJ left it open, then?"

"No," I replied, as I looked out the back window to see what he meant. Sure enough, the one window on the garage, facing into the backyard, was open. Ohsheet, says brain, and remembers potatoes. "But I'm gonna call him and find out..."

LJ sends me out to the garage. "How will I know if what should be there is there?" I ask him. "You'll see it right when you walk in," he replies.

I go out to the garage. I see three very large rectangular hefty-bags, and think Damn, that's a lot of potatoes; go inside the house and call LJ. Relieved, I report to him that there are three bags of potatoes, so apparently nobody took anything.

"I'll be right there," he says.

Ten minutes later he arrives home and heads for the garage; when he returns, it's clear all is not as well as I'd assumed. He is on the phone, talking to the friend to whom the vegetables in question belong...."Yeah, you better get over here RIGHT NOW," he repeats into the phone, more than once. Snapping the phone shut, he tells me: "There was a lot more than that out there."

"Like how much?"

"You couldn't even WALK in that garage when we put everything in there," he informs me.

His friend arrives. "Tell him what you told me," LJ directs me. Conscious of the gravity of the issue, I tell him the bare facts of the story: I'd heard what I thought was the front gate at about 7 that morning, but uncharacteristically I'd stayed in bed instead of getting up to check; then midafternoon Tim had noticed the garage window open; at LJ's behest I'd gone outside and discovered what was there, which I'd reported to LJ; that was the end of the story for me. "And I never even told her what all was back there," LJ interposed, "'cuz I knew she'd flip out if she knew how much we had."

LJ is convinced it's someone off our block, someone who's been watching and has seen LJ go in and out of the backyard; the potatoes' owner is convinced that it's one of LJ's friends, someone close enough to have been told that LJ was going out of town a day or two before, someone close enough to know that LJ was holding potatoes, and in what quantity. We all agreed that it had to have been someone with a truck or a large vehicle, and someone who knew they wouldn't be observed--according to LJ's friend, it had taken two people about 30 minutes to unload the cargo when it first came here, so obviously there was more than one individual involved.

Either way, LJ's friend is out about $100,000, and consequently so are the people who subsidized the potato shipment. He's sure he will find out, someway and somehow, who the culprits were; he even admits he can't be upset with LJ, since LJ had told him repeatedly to come and pick up his property, and he'd been too busy.

So everyone is fine with this, apparently, except for me; I informed LJ that it would be a very bad idea to store such a quantity of vegetables on my property in the future, especially without letting me know it was there. That's all I said to him; privately, though, I'm livid. There's the legal implications, for one thing; I could have been one of those garages you see on the news, with a bunch of proud-looking ATF guys looking as though they'd just saved the world from destruction--and meanwhile, who's got her mugshot on the screen as the owner of the Garage of Iniquity? That's right--good ol' Gladys. And I haven't lost enough weight yet that I'd want a mugshot publicized. Give me 40 more pounds or so, then we can talk.

LJ, needless to say, is on thin ice; of course, since he's kept to the letter of our agreement, paying the car note monthly as his "rent" of his one room, I'm not comfortable kicking him out--and since that money is the only wiggle-room that will allow the mortgage company to rearrange my payments, I can't really afford to lose it no matter what. And, to his defense, both he and the guy he was storing it for acknowledged that LJ had called him several times and told him to get his potatoes out of our garage; apparently it was supposed to be only for a couple of days. That does make me a LITTLE less mad, but not much.

Personally, I'm just looking forward to getting back to work and getting out of the house; the cabin fever is starting to make me crazy.