A Cat's Tale With Chickens, Possums and Dogs by Priscilla King

 

During the Associated Content years, a popular article was the story of how the cat called Black Magic became the Founding Queen of the Cat Sanctuary. That article has been in a stack of AC articles waiting to be reposted ever since AC went down. Of course it has to be revived as a Petfinder post.

The house where I live was not always a Cat Sanctuary. As old-school Granola Greens, my parents didn't keep cats or dogs. Our pets were chickens.

My web site looked at Prince Charles from Smithtown, New York, back in August; his web address is https://www.petfinder.com/bird/prince-charles-56392993/ny/smithtown/smithtown-animal-shelter-ny53/ . Found as a stray, the poor little fellow was photographed while he was molting, so he doesn't look as handsome as nature intended. Shelter staff assure us that his feathers are growing in nicely. Where's the picture? Anyway, they say that, for people who want a pet rooster, he's a gentle, brave, curious, lovable pet. 

Any rooster who stayed with us until he was old enough to crow was a very lovable pet. 

But these chickens did nothing about the rodent problem, which, in an orchard, is fierce. My parents bought into the popular delusion that mice can be controlled by chemical means--poison bait. This is true for one mouse in each generation. Mouse generations vary depending on species but generally last about as long as it takes for the poisoned mouse that died in the insulation in the house walls to decompose enough that you don't smell it any more. Meanwhile the other rodents know to avoid what the one who died was eating, and they are free to run through the house at night, chomping on whatever else they find. If they don't find any spilled or neglected food, they will happily eat books, clothes, and furniture. The resident snake, Gulegi, has always been very fond of rodents, but in winter he was barely able to make a dent in the population.

So I grew up and left the house that always smelled of dead mice for a few years. Then both parents became ill at the same time, and we wanted my natural sister to be able to go to college though she's not academically gifted, so I came back home for a few years. Dad moved into a retirement project. Mother went back to work as a private nurse, mostly living with a geriatric patient. Sister and I were each other's only chaperones, and although we had high standards about sex and drugs and dated only young men who had the same standards, we did a little bit of adolescent rebellion. A fluffy half-grown kitten strayed up our way. Instead of chasing her away, we fed her. 

That's Leo from Fairfax, a similar looking cat, not quite as fluffy, whose web page is https://www.petfinder.com/cat/leo-57327555/va/fairfax/helping-homeless-felines-va653/ . Our fluffy stray kitten, Black Velvet, was friendly but cool and calm; she waited for human attention. Leo, the shelter staff say, demands attention and will hug your knee until he gets it. Already neutered, he gets along well with other animals as long as he can control some human's attention. 

Velvet had been with us for about a week, being fed and called a pretty kitty by whichever humans were at the house on a given day, when my boyfriend came to Dad's apartment looking for me. "I've got you a present you will love," he said, "even though you've already got one just like it."

"A shirt?" I said. He collected NASCAR souvenir shirts and had given me a few. 

"No, not a shirt, but it's black. Come out and see it."

And there on the seat of his air-conditioned car, cool as a cucumber and purring as if she were in competition with the motor, was Black Magic. I didn't try to pick her up, but held out my hands. She popped into my hands and snuggled on my shoulder. She might have weighed all of three pounds; she was a small kitten, Siamese-American. She must have had a happy kittenhood. She always took it for granted that everyone wanted to be her friend. She and I started to bond on sight.

Bristol from Marietta, Georgia, is described as very different from Magic. For a start he's male. Also, though apparently semi-social, he's not lost his family, but comes with a sister. The shelter staff don't mention his being unusually intelligent and say he's shy at first. They do say he will soon learn to purr and cuddle, as he gets to know people. Bristol's web address is https://www.petfinder.com/cat/bristol-57309584/ga/marietta/homeless-pets-foundation-ga140/ .

Magic didn't cuddle up to everyone she ever met, but she always purred. She hardly ever made any other sound, though she had a full Siamese range of sounds she could make when purring seemed inappropriate to her. It was the great loud purr coming out of the tiny kitten that got the two cats their names. Before Dale Earnhardt's cars were a series of "The Intimidator," early models were nicknamed Black Magic and Black Velvet, and we had those souvenir shirts. 

Velvet wasn't social but she accepted Magic's confident friendliness, as everyone of every species seemed to do. 

We soon realized that Magic was not a normal cat at all. She liked riding around with us in cars; she alternated between laps and shoulders, looked out the window, and seemed to enjoy the view. She enjoyed family parties with other animals and children. At parties she circulated, sniffing everyone and allowing everyone to pet her. 

On her first day at my home I whimsically told Magic, "That is a cardinal, the state bird of Virginia. If you're going to live in Virginia now you must always protect cardinals." I'm not sure how many words she understood--though Magic definitely understood words, including words nobody tried to teach her. In any case she did protect our cardinal family. 

She could jump and climb more energetically than your average cat. The attic is ventilated by a little transom window under the porch roof. Magic's trademark move was to leap straight up the door, pushing off as she went up from the door handle and the top of the door frame, and climb into the attic through the transom. Apparently she got along with Gulegi as well as she did with everyone else, and in a few weeks the house stopped smelling of rodents. 

She liked to go for walks with us, too, and use the same vertical jump with a boost from someone's belt to the person's shoulder. I spent much of her first year reminding her, "Be gentle! We're only humans; we have no fur." She was gentle while snuggling but it took her a while to figure out how to sink her claws into a belt or waistband without scratching a friend's waist. But she learned. 

Mother didn't want fur in the house. Magic and Velvet were outdoor cats, even in cold weather. It didn't hurt them since the cellar opens into a shallow cave and maintains earth temperature all year, and the attic got heat from the occupied rooms. The first winter, when her coat didn't look adequate, I used to go outside and let Magic snuggle under my coat until I was shivering. That was how I became her favorite human, though she liked my sister, our boyfriends, and even Mother too. Usually she went to me whenever I was outside; she liked to lurk in the transom and jump down onto my shoulder, but when she was out in the orchard and I called her, she'd sprint a quarter-mile. 

My sister had friends who had what they admitted was a stupid kitten, a whiny little yellow fluffball who liked to sit in an open door. The kitten had been stepped on and had doors closed on her a few times and had not noticeably learned anything from these experiences. The friends dumped this kitten on our doorstep one night, and Magic adopted her. The kitten remained stupid and whiny, addicted to running under people's feet, sitting in doorways, and even running in front of cars to whine for attention, but Magic loved her as if the kitten had been her own daughter. One day after tripping over the kitten I lost patience, shoved her across the porch, and shouted at her. Magic walked over, glared at me, and nipped my thumb in her teeth. That was the only time she ever bit a human, even a vet.

Magic's first kitten was a poor scrawny little thing that never grew any bigger after she was three months old, but she wanted to look like this pampered pair from Louisville when she grew up. If she had ever grown up. She didn't. She was seven or eight months old, and still looked three months old, when she managed to get run over despite all the practice all the neighbors had had at missing her. Clearly Max and Stella, https://www.petfinder.com/cat/max-stella-55842049/ky/louisville/shamrock-pet-foundation-inc-ky105/, will be much more satisfactory pets than Magic's foster kitten was. Even if they like to hide under your bed, pull down the bedding, and shed on your sheet.

Velvet seemed normally intelligent until winter, when she, too, developed a stupid habit. She liked to cuddle up on a car motor. My sister would shoo her out of our little Toyota Corolla and drive off to work, and Velvet would walk down the road and cuddle up on the motor of the neighbors' truck. She didn't live through the winter. 

Magic survived, though, and when she might have been as much as one year old she attracted a mate. She introduced him, and nonverbally told me what fun they'd had. "Take her to the vet before there are kittens all over the place," Mother ordered. So Magic went to the vet. She never seemed to blame me, but after that she became censorious about humans. The boyfriend who'd brought her to me accepted that "She's saying, 'If I can't have sex, why should you?'" By this time my sister had eloped with what her hair-for-brains college classmates considered the prize of their class, so we had no other chaperone and mostly accepted Magic as one. She went along with us on walks, drives, visits, and day trips to any place where cats were allowed. We called her our "kid" and joked about how we'd managed to have a black "daughter." 

It is possible that Magic may still be the only cat who went into the veterinary hospital to be spayed and came home with three kittens. She had mourned for the empty-headed fluffball. She acted for all the world as if she knew the vet hospital was where that kitten had been taken, and hoped to find her foster kitten there. Instead she found three Manx-mix orphans. Being a larger breed, the orphans were already close to Magic's own size. Made no difference to her. They'd lost their mother while they were still young enough to nurse, and Magic was old enough to be a mother cat and nurse kittens whether she could give birth to them or not. I still have, somewhere, a pre-digital photo of skinny little Magic nursing the three big burly kittens.

Nothing special is known about this big burly shelter kitten, https://www.petfinder.com/cat/bear-56230284/ia/nevada/story-co-animal-shelter-ia49/, but he's already neutered and said to be a lovable pet. The selection of adoptable cats near Ames, Iowa ("Bear" hails from a town called Nevada, near Ames) is narrow. They show no Manx or Bobtail cats and none who had Magic's Manx foster kittens' distinguishing feature--skin as black as their fur. (Many black cats have beige or white skin, as has Bear.) 

Manx are one of the breeds most likely to revert to their full ancestral size. While our pets usually weigh about ten pounds, and I doubt that Magic ever weighed more than seven, our pets are descendants of wild cats that weigh twenty to thirty pounds when full-grown. Now and then a normal-looking house kitten continues growing to the size that was originally normal for the species, These throwback cats can look quite alarming though, having been brought up as cuddly pets, they usually remain cuddly pets. Two of the kittens Magic nursed were twenty-pound throwbacks.

After being spayed Magic was allowed to recuperate indoors. She did not appreciate having house privileges. Her human godfather brought in special cat toys to occupy her time while I was at work. She took no interest in toys unless a human was playing with them. She understood and apparently obeyed my instructions about which room she was to stay in and which chairs she was allowed to sit on, but one evening when I came in I heard her crying, as Siamese cats do, like a human baby. She stopped when she heard the key in the door. When I came in she was purring as usual. She took time to sniff and snuggle with me even before she went outside, but what she was really crying for, it seemed, was her babies and pets. By this time Magic had made a docile, obedient pet of First Possum, a big ugly animal who looked as if it might want to eat Magic or a kitten, but actually came and went as Magic directed it, tamed by gifts of mouse insides. She didn't touch the possum but clearly spent a minute or two communicating with it in some way. And she wanted to let the kittens nurse. That they were eating dry kibble made no difference to her. She enjoyed being a mother cat.

The vet had prescribed some chemical treatment to get rid of ear mites, which all the cats had. The little bottle had to be stored in the refrigerator. Naturally the cats were about as keen on this treatment as anyone else would be about having cold liquid poured into our ears. The kittens rebelled, growling and hissing. Magic nonverbally offered to help. I was now in a habit of speaking to her as politely as you would speak to any child or foreigner, and letting her show me whether she'd understood what I said or not, so I said, "Magic, would you please let me give you this medicine?" She stood still and turned an ear up, and took her medicine. Then she gave the kittens a meaningful look, and one by one, in turn, they came to me and took their treatments too. 

Two weeks after the stitches came out, Magic was allowed to spend her days outdoors again. She liked that. She seemed to have resolved, during her confinement, that if she could go out again she'd supply me with food. Every day for a week she brought me something she'd caught--never a mouse, rat, or vole, but always a squirrel or rabbit that some humans would have eaten. I thanked her profusely, each time, and told her to share her treat with her kittens. After a week she realized I didn't eat game, but she continued to show me what she'd caught when she wanted to be praised and petted. 

So far as I knew, only one small animal Magic killed ever knew what had hit it. When she walked with humans, it was always a bounce off the trail, a pounce, and up she came with a dead nuisance animal hanging by its neatly snapped neck from her mouth. She dispatched more vermin than she could eat; she was selective about which parts of which catches she would eat, and gave the scraps to her possums. But one frosty night, although she never wanted to stay indoors for long on a cold night, Magic had shown me two dead mice already and I'd turned in for the night. She knocked at the door to show me yet another mouth. I shouted through the door, "Right, Magic, I've seen mice. Let me sleep. I have to work tomorrow." She did but she wasn't pleased. I could tell because, the next evening, she brought in a live mouse, threw it right on my shoe, and glared up at me, twitching her tail, nonverbally saying, "Since you think catching mice is so easy, let's see you do it!" I asked her nicely to catch the mouse, apologized, praised her hunting prowess, and she caught the mouse and put it out for the kittens. She never tried to show me a mouse after I'd gone to bed for the night, again, and I never neglected to make a fuss over her when she showed me something she'd caught, either.

By the end of Magic's second winter, the house was rodent-free. The Manx kittens, who always did things in order so I called them One, Two, and Three, had grown up; somebody wanted the two giants but Three, the completely tailless kitten who never grew much bigger than Magic, stayed. 

One snowy day a fluffy white tomcat came to visit. I didn't want Mother to be able to smell any evidence that my spayed cats were still attracting the inferior and stinky kind of cats. I put on a thick fleece jacket and went out to put a harness on the tomcat. Cats aren't as good at walking on leads as dogs are, nor are their necks as strong, so a collar on a cat is merely a decoration. To lead a cat anywhere you need a harness that puts the weight, when the cat pulls against the lead, around the cat's ribs and waistline. The tomcat didn't mind being harnessed at all, but he didn't want to step out into the fresh snow through which he'd come. He sprang up onto my coat and held on with his claws, telling me how stupid I was. Magic heard him and charged. No stray tom was allowed to talk to her human that way! She pitched into the tomcat, who looked at least twice her size, scolding him in furious Siamese and leaving clumps of white fur on the snow. I think the tomcat was too startled to resist. He settled down and followed me through the snow to a shed where I tied him up and brought him food and water. I knew someone who wanted a tomcat, and in a few hours he had a good home. 

The whiter, fluffier, and bluer-eyed a white cat is, the more likely it is to be deaf and have other genetic problems. Creamy-colored Sweater from Chicago is described at https://www.petfinder.com/cat/sweater-52445988/il/chicago/paws-chicago-il72/ as a nice low-maintenance pet for the right person. She might not play nicely with other animals or children, and might become bored and destructive in the absence of "multiple play sessions" every day. 

Magic showed other unusual abilities. I learned that she was able to work doorknobs if she really wanted to. When she had to be indoors, what kept her in the mud room, waiting to be let out for a bathroom break, was respect. She could have awakened me with a flying leap onto my waist, the way a boardinghouse cat of my student days used to do.

Dock from Lafayette, Louisiana, probably isn't quite as big or as old as that boardinghouse cat but he's described at https://www.petfinder.com/cat/dock-56124515/la/lafayette/wild-cat-foundation-la140/ as big and old. 

Then there was the day one of her foster kittens (Magic always found foster kittens) attracted a barely half grown "boyfriend" kitten. Magic knocked at the door, growling. "What are you growling about?" She pointed to the stray kitten in the yard. "You found another little sister?" She growled more loudly. The kitten was not a sister. Magic's foster father and I, all grown up at thirty, often expressed impatience with the number of teenaged females in our lives, called them all "sisters," found fault with them, wished them well, and felt protective about them. Magic recognized "sisters" as a word for junior cats who were too big and old to be called "babies," but she had figured out on her own that "sisters" did not include males. 

Gato from Denver, https://www.petfinder.com/cat/gato-57324129/co/denver/the-snuggle-is-real-animal-rescue-co552/z, looks as if he's had a softer life than that stray tomkitten had had, but he has the same orange fur, amber eyes, and reportedly the same loud purr. 

Magic also had some sense, though I'm not sure how much sense, of English grammar. Most animals who learn words don't seem to have a sense that words can fit together in different ways to mean different things. What they learn on their own are usually words for food and people's names. What they can be taught are commands. When most animals learn a word like "sit!", they understand it to mean "I'm ordering you to assume the 'sitting' position" and are confused if they ever notice the use of "sit" in a sentence like "They sit together on the bus." Magic did, however, listen to conversations among humans and react to news items. Once someone reminisced in her presence about a long-ago scandal--a butcher shop "used to kill cats and sell them as rabbit meat." Magic was genuinely shocked and scared; she knew that a phrase like "cats kill mice" was good news and "some people kill cats" was, in her view, obviously a warning about a murderer at large. 

She seemed not to accept death uncomprehendingly, as most animals do, but to wonder where departed friends were now and why they couldn't be helped. Pogo, a possum she'd tamed, took to chasing cars and was run over. Magic didn't avoid the part of the road where his remains lay, during the days it took crows, vultures, one other scavengers to clear them away, but she always observed them closely, while walking on the other side of the road, as if cats can think of questions like "Do 'people' look like meat inside, too? Where is Pogo now? Why can't anyone help?" 

She was distressed when Three didn't report for breakfast. She didn't show me the body; vultures did that, later. I don't think she knew exactly where Three had died, but she knew Three had not just run off with a tomcat. She must have seen some part of what happened. Three had strayed down the road, past the home of a relative of mine who had married beneath her, and the unworthy husband had shot her through the body. Three had run about half of the way back toward home, through a woodlot, before she fell. 

The next time I walked down the road toward that neighbor's house, Magic would not stay home, as she usually did; she would not turn back at the property line, as she did when she didn't stay home; she would not even stay home to eat when I set out food. She wanted to stay with me. I stamped and yelled and threw pebbles in her direction to keep her from following me to the paved road. She had learned a healthy fear of moving vehicles, and I thought I'd succeeded in convincing her I was suffering from temporary insanity, as I proceeded to the paved road. Magic had turned back, but when I was about a city block away, she seemed to feel that duty required her to confront her fears. I picked up some things out of a cat on the road. I heard a bang while I was reaching into the car. When I left the car and walked back home, Magic was lying beside the road, shot in the head. 

Horrified, slow to imagine that any neighbor of mine could have shot at Magic, I picked her up and asked the gloating neighbor, "What happened?" Magic wasn't bleeding. Something must have exploded and stunned her. 

"That black rascal's been climbing up on my car, chasing birds in the tree and making a mess, all week..." the neighbor began. (In fact a black tomcat, much bigger than Magic, had been straying around the neighborhood.) He was holding a gun. 

"My cat? Magic? She's been with me--she was with me in the garden this morning! I tried to make her turn back, but she kept following me out to the road. What happened?" Maybe I thought the neighbor was going to confess that he'd killed my innocent pet by mistake, apologize, and become forgivable. 

But he said, "Oh, I don't know what happened. Been lying there like that all day. I saw A drive out in his usual hurry--maybe he ran over that cat! I saw B walk by. Does he have a gun?" 

B was the neighbor whose education had been retarded by a physical injury in childhood. Officially he was an "ineducable moron." In fact he could have done a good half-dozen jobs better than some people who were employed at them, if he'd been able to learn to talk and read a few years earlier than he was. After Magic, the most innocent, benevolent, well-behaved person in the neighborhood would have been B. B was actually on his way to becoming a preacher, but he never earned enough money from preaching to affect his disability pension. But welfare cheating was his only vice, and in view of the way people had treated him I always felt he had a right to it.

"Tries to blame B of all people!" I raged to the neighbor in between that house and mine. "If there was a stray cat, it had more right to be alive than that scum has." I called lawyers. The law prescribed that someone who killed a neighbor's pet cat could be sentenced to "up to one year" in jail. This was the standard penalty for most misdemeanors in Virginia and the subject of a song about "Eleven Twenty-Nine." I wanted that neighbor to serve more time than that, actually. "Magic never acted like that before. It has to have been because she knew who killed her foster kitten. That little cat was trying to protect me." 

I was assigned a young attorney fresh out of law school. The relative (other relatives insisted that she would have had no choice, that the bad neighbor abused her too) took advantage of connections and retained Terry Kilgore. My court-appointed attorney didn't do his job before the trial and, when we sat down facing the rising star of our town, he basically rolled over and played dead. The words "not proved," which are not an official sentence in Virginia, were in the judge's pronouncement. The jerk's wife and the two neighbors in between us had all seen the neighbor take a gun, or some sort of long object, possibly a Weed-Eater, out into his yard, and they'd all seen me pick up my freshly killed, still warm cat five minutes later, but none of them had actually seen him shoot my cat. Maybe they really were looking another way, maybe they wanted to protect the wife from a beating, who will ever know? 

"You can retry the case as a civil suit," the judge said to me.

"Let's," I said to another lawyer who had worked with my family while Terry Kilgore was in college.

"A better use for the money," he said, "would be to build a monument to put on that cat's grave. They usually go by the verdict from the criminal trial." 

Grateful for this information, I said, "I donated the cat's body to medical science, but that does give me an idea." 

I went home and looked at Magic's last foster kittens, now year-old cats, one spayed and one the mother of five new baby kittens. Then I declared our few acres to be a Cat Sanctuary. The only kind of memorial Magic would have wanted, I said, would be a place where kittens would be appreciated. Not, I said, mindful of Mother's blood pressure, inside the house. They could be barn cats. (I don't think Mother knew that the new baby kittens had been born on her carpet, behind the armchair. By the time she got home they had a box on the porch.) 

And the couple who lived between the bad neighbor and me put up some pieces of chain-link fence and declared their home a Dog Sanctuary.

Sam von Salm, from Los Angeles, https://www.petfinder.com/dog/sam-von-salm-55720867/ca/los-angeles/westside-german-shepherd-rescue-of-la-ca785/ , is almost big enough to lick the face of an adult standing straight, and he's not a year old yet. None of our next-door dogs was quite that big.

A few months later the relative who'd married the scum neighbor sold their house. Scum was, she said, in a nursing home. Had a heart attack, Not expected to live through the summer.

Later I heard that he survived the heart attack and even went back to work somewhere. But I never saw him in my neighborhood again.

The Glorious Presence Of The White Pickup Truck

Men of America, what is it about the white pickup truck?

 "In all my travels, as the truth unravels, I have found this to be true..."  S.Dan

They are everywhere.  You can be sedately booking down a sleepy freeway in the American mid-country anywhere when suddenly a vehicle is breathing down your neck, panting to go faster and better and further and sexier and ten times out of about 12 times its a white pickup.  

I used to think that it was just Mexicans who love da white peekup.  But I guess not.  It seems to be country men of all stripes.  Doesn't matter, or maybe I don't perceive who drives which make.  Is there a school of Ford vs Chevy, or who drives those monster Ram things?  Or my model up there, the GMC? 

Does it have something to do with which part of the country?  I have noticed that up in the hills around here there seems to be a lot of red ones.  Hm.

Perhaps some of you ladies have wisdom in the matter of pickup trucks?  

Herein lies a short questionnaire:

1.  Do you possess a white pickup truck?

2. Did your father, brother, lover, grampa or husband drive one? Mother?  Sister?

3. Do you have any idea why they chose white over other likely colors?

4. Do they hand out literature in rural high schools giving the lore and secret knowledge of the white pickup truck?

5.  In rural communities, what would happen to a man should he lose all sense and buy a blue or black pickup and drive it around?

Ahem, What Madness is This?

An Absence Of Angels

* Today's post courtesy of Petercat * 

✏✏✏

It had rained earlier that evening, and as the heavy car glided down the interstate, he could not shake his black depression.  He wasn't certain that he even wanted to, he had grown accustomed to the mood. The overcast night was the perfect setting, the staccato hissing of the tires on the rain-wet roadway the perfect white noise to accompany his thoughts.

As the headlights powered through the layered fog, his thoughts turned to the events of recent months.

For two years, it had been the perfect job. It hadn't been long after he had signed on that he realized that it was a Christian company, and the owner was a Christian man. Nobody ever said anything, it was obvious in the way that everyone from the owner down to the janitor treated each other. Everyone in the office was a professional. There had been none of the competition or backstabbing that he had encountered in other offices, no inflated egos, no conflict. Everyone had their own skills, their own weaknesses, and they worked well together to get the job done.

He should have known it wouldn't last, but he couldn't have known that it would get so bad so fast.

A couple of months before, his company had hired a new office manager, a religious zealot of the worst kind. The first indication of trouble was in the new man's first memo, in which he introduced himself, his religious dogma, and ended with a scripture quote. None of which had anything to do with business. The driver's immediate response upon reading it was to say "We are SO screwed!"

He hadn't realized that he had spoken aloud until one of his co-workers, standing next to him, laughed and said, "So you've worked for Christian fanatics before, huh?"

"Oh, yeah. Never by choice, and never for long. The most unforgiving, self-righteous perfectionists (except where it comes to their own performance) around. This place has just fallen into the toilet!"

The first office meeting with the New Guy proved his concerns.  He opened with prayer, and then began an hour-long monologue consisting of religious instruction, threats and very little business.

The office damage was great. Gone was the camaraderie, the cooperation. Everyone was more intent on covering their tracks than in getting things done. No one could escape the feeling that the New Guy was watching every move, waiting for someone to make a mistake so that he could pounce in righteous outrage.

Nothing like working under someone who thought it was perfectly okay to toss scripture out of one side of his mouth, insults and abuse out of the other.

Ah, well, soon it would be time to move on. He knew he was too good at what he did to work for a man like that for long.

His thoughts returned to the fog-shrouded highway. Approaching an exit where there was a truckstop, he remembered that he had failed to check the car before starting on his trip, as was his habit. The Cadillac had very few miles on it, and didn't use any fluids, but still... He decided to pull off at the next exit to be sure.

He guided the car onto the ramp, letting the engine drag slow it until he pulled off onto the shoulder. If the Caddy needed anything, he would pull into the truckstop there. If not, he would cross the road and reenter the highway. At least it wasn't raining anymore, just the overcast hiding the moon. A perfect night for his mood.

He heard the other car pulling onto the shoulder behind his before he saw the headlights. Glancing up as he shut the hood, he saw that one of them was badly aimed and knew it wasn't a cop, so it was probably trouble of some kind. Before he stepped out where the other driver could see him clearly, he reached inside his jacket and unsnapped the restraining strap on the .45 in the holster on his belt. As the headlights went out, the door opened and by the dome light inside he could see two women. The driver got out and walked towards him.

"Excuse me, sir. Can you help us?"

Oh yeah, here it comes. First the sob story, then the request for money.

"We're trying to get to Atlanta, and we're broke and on empty. Could you put a little gas in our car?"

He felt that she was real... He could recognize fear, and she was afraid. Afraid that he would turn her down, and she would have to ask another. And another, and another, until she found someone who would help her. But what price would be demanded for that help, besides her pride? She wasn't, after all, too unattractive.

"All right," he replied, "Follow me to that truckstop." He motioned with his hand. "I'll buy you enough to get there."

Sliding behind the wheel, deep in thought, he eased the caddy onto the ramp and turned at the top towards the truckstop.  They were far from Atlanta. She pulled up to the pump behind him, and as he slid his Visa card through the scanner to turn the pump on, he glanced at the tag on her car. Fulton county, so she hadn't been lying.

He filled her tank, more to make sure that it had really been on empty than out of generosity. She explained that they had been worried, not for themselves, but for her infant son in the back seat. He asked her if they needed anything else, and she said that she needed diapers, then half-laughed as she added that she probably wouldn't find any in a truckstop. He smiled and responded, "You'd be surprised. They sell a little of everything in there. Go look while I finish up here." He'd noticed the ashtray when he'd looked inside the car, and asked "Do you need anything else? Food, drinks, cigarettes?"

The last thing she had said to him was to thank him, telling him how she and her sister had prayed for God to send them an angel to help. He had laughed at that, replying that apparently all of God's angels were busy, so she'd gotten him instead.

As he powered the heavy car down the ramp, gliding back onto the wet interstate, he spoke mockingly. "Thanks a lot, God. Now I'm out fifty dollars because you couldn't be bothered." He eased off the throttle as the Caddy reached his preferred cruising speed and continued, "So what's up? They prayed for you to send an angel to help, and you let them down. Were all your angels too busy? Were those ladies unworthy because they smoked? Are you really as cold and unforgiving as our new office manager seems to think?"

He was silent for a moment, listening to the road noises as the car floated down the highway. "C'mon, God, why did I have to do it?  I've seen the movies, I've watched the TV shows, why didn't you send an angel to help them?"

As he eased back into the seat, a voice, polished with humor, spoke in his ear:

"I did."

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Blessings, Consequences, And The Presence Of Angels

 * Today's post courtesy of Angry Rapscallion *

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    It’s 1977... and I’m a sailor cruising some of my usual haunts looking to buy some organic contraband for the trip home during my upcoming leave.  I’m not proud to admit this (not ashamed either) but this was 1977 and pot was as common as fried chicken at an Assembly of God potluck dinner. A friend (?) introduced me to a guy who could allegedly (?) hook me up with a high grade version of the product I sought for an acceptable price.  Having had a meeting of the minds we climbed into his car and drove off to do the deal.

    When we got to our destination, which was notably dark and secluded, he asked to see the money before making the deal.  Being an old hand at these kinds of transactions, I informed him that my money and I were inseparable.  At this juncture he produced the largest folding knife I had ever seen and explained that I was either going to release custody of my money or my life.  Not seeing either of these outcomes as acceptable, I ejected myself from the vehicle and began quickly surveying the area in search of a safe escape route.  I remember a car was coming down the road.  I waved it over and explained quite quickly that the guy who was coming towards us was probably going to kill us all and asked for a ride.  He rolled up his window, accelerated, and left me standing alone in the middle of the road.  

    The only way out that allowed for evasive action appeared to be an alleyway across the street.  I sprinted towards it, but as I turned the corner I discovered I had made what was probably going to be the worst and last mistake of my ever-shortening life. The alley, as it turned out, was a dead end between two buildings that were joined by a fenced in walkway that blocked my last chance for escape.  I turned to face the thug who was openly brandishing his knife and calculating the risk factors based on my physical appearance.

    They say that your life passes before your eyes in those last moments between life and all eternity, and I’m here to tell you that it does.  As I watched a short mental video of all my poor life choices, I remember thinking, “What a shame it was I had eluded the valuable lessons that I could have learned from those experiences, only to end up bleeding out in some filthy Long Beach gutter, all for a $10 dollar bag of weed."

     I can’t tell you much about my assailant other than he was whitish and on the larger side of terrifying.  He was saying things, but I couldn’t understand them above the sound of traffic and the rapid pounding of my heart.  At this point in the game I would have given him everything I possessed as long as it didn’t involve me getting closer to that gigantic knife.  I mean, where do you even get a folding knife that big!?  Isn’t it strange the huge amounts of data your brain can process while you are facing imminent death.  I remember knowing that while this alley had not been on my itinerary for the evening, it had been the focal point of my pursuer's plan all evening long. He had the definite advantage of knowing exactly what came next.  I on the other hand could only guess and try not to piss my pants.  Here I was fixing to die and the thing I’m worried about most is crime photos in which I had soiled myself.  The brain is an amazing thing.

    And then it happened... out of nowhere I hear someone yell, and quite loudly at that... "FREEZE, LET ME SEE YOUR HANDS."  As I turned to face the origin of this noise, I caught a glimpse of my attacker flipping his knife up and over a fence. I heard it rattle across the sidewalk on the other side. You cannot possibly understand how relived I was to hear it.

    The man who yelled "FREEZE" was a NOT so overly large, unarmed African-American.  Both myself and the “sidewalk commando” outweighed him by a few pounds and yet we somehow accepted the fact that he was in charge now.  He created a safe zone by stepping into the void between myself and my attacker.  I was the first to speak and began ejecting words like a machine gun.  As soon as I found my voice I blurted out, “This guy was going to rob me,” apparently assuming murder was too bold an accusation, considering the fact that I was still alive. The “sidewalk commando” countered that we were old friends arguing over a past due debt.  I obviously wasn’t going to stand for any of that nonsense and found the courage to add the possibility of murder to the conversation.  I insisted that I had never seen this guy before, which set up the obvious next question, “Then what were you doing in his car?”  Realizing that the only two reasons a man might end up in a stranger’s car on a dark street late at night were gay sex or a dope deal, I decided to let the subject go.

    Once the three of us realized the truth about our circumstances was going to remain a mystery, the African-American guy told my knife-wielding buddy to get in his car and GO, which he did with astounding rapidity.  He must have had warrants. Then the African-American told me to get in the back of his Dodge Charger.  I resigned myself to the inevitability of ending my evening at the offices of the Long Beach USN Shore Patrol, but thought I’d give it one more chance to turn things my way.  Once my rescuer had buckled in and fired up the Charger, I began what I hoped would be a successful attempt to escape the long arms (or hands) of the law.  I told him if he would be so kind as to leave me at the bar where my evening had started, and keep the Navy Shore Patrol in the dark about this little mishap, I would voluntarily return to base, where I would stay out of any trouble for the rest of the night.

    Imagine my shock when he laughed and said... ”You guys really believed I was a cop? I’m not a cop, but I know a possible homicide when I see one going down.  It was the only thing I could think of to help you, and I was surprised it actually worked.  Where do you want to be dropped off?”  Barely believing my luck, I named a bar and he turned to head back in that direction.  As we made our way through traffic he asked me, “You were buying dope weren’t you?” I couldn’t see the harm in telling him the truth so I meekly replied in the affirmative.  He went on to tell me how in God’s world, life is an endless stream of blessings or consequences.  According to the righteousness of our choices, we manufacture our own joy or misery.  He suggested that I might want to ponder that paradigm in the future... were I so lucky as to have a future.

    When we got to the bar I offered to buy him several drinks, which he rejected en masse.  He reminded me again of the rule for joy and consequences then bid me adieu.  It was a short conversation... not your expected evangelical sermon.  It was short and succinct.  To this day I remember every word of it.  You know what I cannot remember?  I can’t remember the guy’s face.  Seriously, not one single facet of it.  It’s as if he didn’t have one.  I know I must have looked him in the eye at some point, but his features were gone as quickly as he had appeared.

    Many years later in a conversation between myself and two new believers, I relayed this story along with the suspicion I had always held, that my rescuer was in fact an angel or some sort of heavenly being. I expected to be chided, but instead found out that all three of us had a similar experience, right up to the point of not being able to recall the rescuer's face. 

    One friend was saved from a fatal beatdown in prison. He had refused to do something he was told to do.  I have no idea what that was but I suppose we could guess.  He got caught alone in one of those locations that are inevitable in the prison system, and as his attackers set up their ambush, another African-American prisoner stepped in and told them to stop... and OMG... they did. They all did exactly what he told them to do.  He swore that, as with me, he had never seen the man before or since.  He also could not describe his face.

    The other member of our trio had planned to commit suicide while on perimeter watch in the Army.  He had been singled out by the drill instructor for extra special abuse and had come to the end of what he could possibly take. He could not live with the shame of more failure in his life, and he had a rope secreted in his jacket, and planned to do the deed when he got to the end of the perimeter.  He sat down, ostensibly to say one last goodbye to this cruel world, and was in fits of weeping.  Suddenly he became aware of someone standing beside him.  It was a drill instructor, he supposed from some other unit.  The guy gave him a handkerchief to wipe his eyes and promised that things would be better for him soon, and encouraged him to just hang in there.  As predicted, the abuse stopped the very next day.

    All three of us were white and our rescuers were black.  None of us ever saw our rescuers before or after. You can make what you wish of the odds that this would happen to three guys in a racially divided world... three guys who would come together one day to share their stories and multiply their faith. I suppose there could be a logical explanation for these events, though I have no freaking idea what that could possibly be.  Personally, I’ve come to think that if we were able to see all the ways in which God was directly intervening in our lives, we would go insane.

    God is in everything.  Every being and every moment.  Man has either known or suspected this from the moment he became sentient.  Seeking God for us is as necessary as finding food and drink.  We manufacture our own joy or misery based on how much distance we allow between ourselves and God. Be kind to everyone you meet.  They may be messengers from God.

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How Am I Even Alive?

 * Today's post courtesy of nanasbananas. *

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When I think about it, I shouldn’t be here. Alive, I mean. So many times I somehow survived my foolishness and carelessness, so here I am. 

As a Believer in God, I believe that He protects and takes care of us. Some are kept safe in the here and now, some are actually safe in the next life. Sometimes it’s as simple as your schedule being messed up and you grumble and complain only to discover that a little further on there was an accident that you ‘missed’. But have you ever had something so amazing happen to you that you were left wondering “what on earth! How am I even alive!”? God does things like that and it sure gets our attention. Something like that happened to my husband when he was a young fellow. He never forgot it, never stopped telling the story. 

In our ‘neck of the woods’, there’s an older road parallel to the freeway that connects two of our towns. It’s pretty lousy, always needing a lot of repair, and I’ve heard there’s a small fault line on part of it sometimes causing the road to crack and sink. Everyone knew that, yet everyone drove too fast anyway, sure they had it under control. Practice makes perfect? 

Heading home from the “big city” to town once, my husband was tooling along, too fast of course, when all of a sudden he saw a huge tree ahead. Right in the middle of the road! He could even see the roots, the cracks. You can bet he never used those brakes as fast as he did that time! Thing is, when he got out of the car and walked up to look - there was no tree! There was, however, a larger than usual crack and sinking in the very spot he ‘saw’ the tree. If he’d hit that at the speed he was going…..!? 

Sometimes maybe God likes to “shock” us, to wake us up, make us pay attention. I don’t know why he survived that evening, but I reckon someday there will be an answer. (Patience, nanasbananas, patience). 

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Today A World Is Born

 

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Rosh Hashanah, the celebration of the Jewish New Year, begins this evening at sundown and continues through nightfall on Tuesday. It is the birthday of the universe, the day God created Adam and Eve, and it’s celebrated as the head of the Jewish year, and a day of judgment and coronation of God as king.

Being a non-Jewish person, many of the little traditions which make up this day have held very little significance to me personally. But as I learn more I am finding, as with all things, that looking beneath the surface reveals the deeper concepts of what continually makes the universe beautiful and new.

It's pretty much an open thread kind of day, so discuss whatever comes to mind. And of course we will be following pbird's journey across the state of Oregon today as she inches closer to home.

L’shana tovah u’metukah 

(Best wishes for a good and sweet year)

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These articles were quite interesting and informative:

What Is Rosh Hashanah?

Rosh Hashanah and the Warping of Time

How this day is the first day of everything that ever was.

By Tzvi Freeman

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Thought for the day:

"Effectively, every moment of “now” becomes the beginning of everything."

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-LoneStar Neanderthal

On The Road: Bluff, Utah to Ely, Nevada

As you all know, daughter and I have been on an expedition through a few western states hunting the elusive pictograph, among other things. 

Here are a few photos she took in Bluff, Utah: 

As you can see, the images on the rock are small, faint and very very old.  If you study them and maybe enlarge them, you can see the motifs painted or carved into the face of the rock.  We seem to remember that they are considered the work of the Archaic Era or Glen Canyon Linear up to Basketmaker and Pueblo III and Navajo, three hundred to three thousand years old.

 

For your further amusement, we made a rough little video about our adventures today driving to Nevada.  Please excuse the sound on a couple of the clips, I did have my little mic, but the wind or something affected the sound.

In addition, I include a couple of songs.  You will have to decide which one suits best.

- or -

A driving song, no?

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A Tale From Araby, circa 1995

 * Today's post courtesy of MathMom *

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This little story could be a Saudi rom-com, where a guy wants to get married, so he puts his parents on the task and they find him a wife.  The tradition, which, in the 1990’s, was still followed by most families, was to negotiate a bride price with an eligible girl’s father, pay up, and she would be brought to the wedding.  The groom and bride would meet on the wedding day.  The bride would be veiled.  The new husband would get to lift her veil, and if he didn’t like what he saw, he could reject her, and the deal would be off. 

In this story, the future groom was one of MathMan’s employees.  He had quite a few guys of marriage age working for him, and they told him how it was becoming difficult to get married unless a guy had a house.  It was so important, that the company gave men of marriage age interest-free loans for SR50,000 (roughly $20K in 1995) to enable them to build a house, which improved their marketability.  The price for a good bride (not some tribal/bedou girl) was also about SR50,000  so a guy who had already spent SR50,000 building a villa, was well into his bank account before he got to the altar. 

The family of MathMan’s employee was super liberal.  They were going to try that new thing that some families were permitting – they’d allow the future bride and groom to meet, once, before the wedding.  The groom might even get to see his future bride’s face.  The future groom’s hands were sweating.  The future bride was brought in, with her chaperone, probably a brother.  The future groom said, “Do you have any questions?”  The list of potential questions could fill a book.

This girl took her opportunity.  She asked him, “Do you have a nice house?”  He said, “Yes.”  She said, “OK. I’ll marry you.”  That was it.  Her future was now sealed.   In a month or so, she would become his property, and would start having children.

When MathMan told me about her question and answer, I felt like I was going to cry.  The future groom told MathMan, in a low, quiet voice, that he got to see her face, and she was pretty.  At least she wouldn’t be returned at the altar. 

So, if you were the bride, and you had the opportunity to ask questions, what would you ask?

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