Mrs. Bronx is a Veterinary Technician (think Nurse For A Veterinarian).
She sometimes gets side jobs, like animal-sitting while an owner is away
on vacation, or going to their homes to give medical treatments to sick
pets. This week, she's been doing both in one. Her boss is away for a
few days, and has a sick dog. She asked Mrs. Bronx to go stop by twice
a day and feed the menagerie (2 very large parrots, three dogs, and a
cat). It's one of the dogs that's ill, but it was the cat who had a
major roll in the dramas of the day.
Now, one of the major issues we have to deal with is that Mrs. Bronx
can't drive. I have to take her where ever she needs to go, and, since
Little Bronx is only seven, he has to come along too. This is stressful
on it's own -- more than I often let on to her. Or, at least, I make a
point of not nagging her about it.
Be that as it may, today we ended up at this boss lady's house, where,
at least ostensibly, we have been given the run of the place. I've been
taking advantage of their high-speed Internet connection, for instance.
Mrs. Bronx has been looking after the animals, and Little Bronx has been
having a ball playing with their dogs. He also likes their television.
We don't have TV at our house, so watching "Spongebob" off the air, as
opposed to off a rented DVD, is a treat for him. So this is the setup:
Mrs. Bronx is outside feeding the dogs, which requires her close
attention, since the sick one has medicine in his bowl that he needs to
take, and he hasn't been eating much to begin with; I'm at a table,
downloading distros while I have the opportunity; and Little Bronx is
dividing his time between the dogs outside, and his show on the TV
inside. At one point, Mrs. Bronx comes inside, asking him about the
front door, which he'd forgotten to shut in one of his manic trips back
and forth. He doesn't know how long it's been open. Okay, but where's
the cat...?
Seems like Pussy made a break for it, and Pussy is an indoor former
foster animal. We'd yelled at Little Bronx a dozen times, on different
occasions, to shut the door. But we weren't watch him closely, and an
animal in my wife's care went missing. Well, Little Bronx is difficult
to deal with in a crisis, wanting to "help", when all we want to do is
scream him. Really, it's hard to describe the anger that wells up at
those times, anger that has grown like a pernicious and particularly
aggressive weed in an otherwise barren field. As he interfered with the
search, he was sent to the car, to wait. As he is the kid he is, he
couldn't wait in the car, and kept getting out to try and explain, or
apologize, or help us in the search. In fact, he did try and find the
cat early on, but it degenerated into conflict, as it always seems to.
Okay, so, he's in the car sobbing over his fate and that of the cat, I'm
walking the fence line of this rather sizable chunk of heavily-brushed
property, and Mrs. Bronx is scouring the area closer to the house.
Eventually, Little Bronx, having been crying by himself for a good
while, got out and asked if he could sing us a song he'd made up.
Sobbing almost hysterically, he sings the following:
Inside, I am shattered
I don't know where the cat is
I left the door open and he got out
But my heart is shattered and I'm sorry
We eventually found that the cat was hiding under the house, in an
opening in the foundation (the husband to the boss is one of those
fix-em-up handyman types who starts a hundred projects a year and
finishes about two, so he's still working on the foundation twenty years
after they moved in). Well, it's just fucking impossible to get down
there, so my wife tries to lure the cat out with food. She succeeds for
a while, but the cat is skittish as hell now, and tries to attack us
every time we get near, and keeps running back under the house. And
Little Bronx keeps getting out to "help", scaring the cat off again.
Well, this is maddening. Add to it all the weather, which has been
unseasonably cold and snowy (I mean, it's May, for god's sake). Mrs.
Bronx calls the boss, who is generally laid back and cool with her, and
is about this too, but she has no advice for us. Finally, it's getting
late. We have to get Little Bronx home, get some dinner in him, and
then begin the torturous process of getting him to bed; and Mrs. Bronx
is standing outside with just a sweater on, as snow falls all around. I
played like the Great Patriarch then, and ordered us to leave. She
could put down food and water for the cat, but we had to go, and try
again on the morrow. That didn't sit well, but it was necessary, and I
still stand by it.
Tomorrow, we'll go out and drop off Mrs. Bronx, and Little Bronx and I
will go out geocaching or something, and she'll try to get that cat out
from under the house with some peace and quiet -- assuming it's still
under there by then. It occurs to me now that we could have blocked off
the hole, somehow (there's PLENTY of junk lying around which would have
served -- I may phlog just about that some day), but because I'm only
clever after the fact, there's no guarantee the animal will even be
around come the morning.
I don't give two shits about this cat, truth be told, except where there
may be recriminations for Mrs. Bronx at her job -- and, especially where
the memory of this incident, and of his parent's nearly-violent
reactions to it. may haunt Little Bronx in future time. Because he's
old enough to remember this incident forever. And if he was made to
feel like a screw-up here, where will it end? Where will all these many
incidents with him end? All the time, I hear people say how kids can
get over anything, That kids are tough, that they're resilient. Well,
not in my experience. Little Bronx is sensitive. Deeply so. Maybe
more than I ever was, and I was an intense little kid. No, he's
fragile, and brilliant, and troubled. And his parents sometimes freak
out over somebody else's goddamn cat squatting under their goddamn
house. And sometimes our boy sings to us of his pain. And don't I just
feel like the biggest shit-heal on Earth, as he weeps for this cat, and
Mrs. Bronx buries her fury for a moment to hold him and kiss him? Don't
I just feel like a tyrant and a schoolyard bully for yelling at him to
keep put, which is something he really, really can't do?
Inside I'm shattered too, I guess. Shattered and hiding under a
stranger's house.
