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Our Messed Up Pets

Part 1: Dopey

By Ron KretschmerPublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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This is Moby, the newest and possibly the strangest of the bunch.

My wife and I were married for 27 years and together we raised 3 wonderful kids. She passed away about 6 months ago, after a long battle with an autoimmune disease made complicated by Covid. As what would have been our 28th anniversary approaches, and I am getting ready to sell the house we lived in for so many years, I was thinking about the great memories that were born here. A lot of those memories involve the odd dogs and cats that come through here. I won't hit every single one in this series, but the ones that make the list are worth the read. If you want a preview, consider the photo of Moby as evidence that we nurtured some weird animals.

Dopey (cat): when we first got married we lived in this tiny apartment. Seriously, there are minivans bigger than that space, but we were newly married and working crazy hours so space wasn't high on our priority list. We had scraped together enough money to buy 1 luxury item that we had been wanting because we just new that a VCR would complete us. On our way to buy the VCR, we did an about-face and turned into the animal shelter instead. When you're in love, spontaneous shifts come easy and seem to make all the sense in the world. The VCR would have to wait because we were coming home with a kitten.

Dopey looked so normal at the shelter. The tiny little brown fur-ball was the cutest, sweetest thing in the whole place, so she came home with us. Well, actually she came to work with us at the little restaurant that helped pay our rent for the minivan-size abode. She stayed in a box, in the office. She only escaped once, but never got out of the general box area. Her feline momma had raised her good.

There are 2 critical things to understand about this particular kitten: she loved us and her little teddy bear, and she hated absolutely everyone else in the entire universe. If you were alive in 1996, sorry, she hated you. Her case of separation anxiety was so acute that she would take showers with us, which is kind of cute but also a bit creepy in a sense. When we were both gone during the day, she would literally turn on the radio or the television. Alone time was not her happy time. You know how cats let you like them by giving you the opportunity to give them affection when it suits them? Not Dopey. Dopey could not get enough human interaction.

That is to say that she could not get enough of human interaction if we were the humans. She regarded any other carbon-based being as biological waste. After a year in the tiny apartment, we moved to a larger duplex with 2 rooms, so she had ample space to not like our guests from another room entirely. That did not happen. Perhaps she felt threatened that someone else was going to take her place as the one that craved our attention and climbed into the shower to be near us. How do you make a cat understand that the Pastor and his wife will be departing after dinner and they have absolutely no desire to be that close to us? When other people were in her house, she became a tempest of hate and hissing, leaving no doubt what she thought of those interlopers. Once it was just us again, she was as sweet and docile as a... kitten.

The only other entity that she had allowed into her inner circle was her teddy bear that we had put in her box at the very beginning. Those 2 must have imprinted on each other that first night because they were darn near inseparable thereafter. She'd use her teeth to pick him up and carry him wherever she went. They were tight. They were soul mates. But, like any close relationship, they had their heated moments as well. I could never figure out exactly what the tiny little stuffed teddy bear would do to piss her off, but she would howl bloody murder at him and them slap the stuffing out of him. He'd go flying across the floor like he'd been thrown by a horse, and then she'd start the process all over again. One would have thought that the poor guy would either fall apart from the abuse, or else decided he couldn't take it anymore and leave, but he hung around for all of her days.

And that was the first of the objectively odd house pets that we had. In some ways, she was the oddest and she certainly was the most unhinged of the lot, but she would not be the last of the wild bunch.

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About the Creator

Ron Kretschmer

Ron is a published writer, illustrator, and teacher. from Tacoma, WA. He recently lost his wife of 27 years to health complications related to Covid-19. Together they had 3 children. Ron enjoys writing, painting, sports, and movies.

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