I haven’t written a Socotra piece for a long time. My usual excuse is time, actually a lack of it like all of the rest of us who labor in what Vic terms the Imperial City. The money is why we are here and a necessary blessing; the traffic, assholes and bureaucracy are the curse. I have several pieces in work that I’ve been sitting on, one for well over a year, but I felt compelled to capture the last couple of interesting days in writing. I’m no Hemingway but ole Ernie and I share the same passions – a love for beautiful women, booze, good literature, and cats. I could also throw in exotic locations, but where the genesis of this story started; it would be hard to it put on your hit list for places to have fun – Dayton, Ohio. This is a love story.
Dayton is the birthplace of aviation – you people in North Carolina sit down. Ohio is where the dream of flight of Wilbur and Orville Wright originated; Kitty Hawk was the testing range. All of the intellectual and ground-breaking engineering thought to get humans into the air happened in Dayton. I had driven through Dayton several times and aside from stopping to take a piss or get a burger on I-70 while driving across the country, I never gave it a second thought. So, on this trip with some time to kill, we carved a couple of hours out of our meeting schedule to visit the National Museum of the USAF. I highly recommend it – time well spent. The other thing that I discovered was that the people of the mid-West, Ohio being a Red State, are not all that vain or pretentious, but rather are decent and possess gentle souls – unlike the assholes we contend with every fucking day in DC, or what they like to increasingly call “the DMV.”
My traveling companion and I arrived via air about the same time at Dayton International, and completed a fam trip to Wright-Pat AFB before checking into our basic business hotel in the outskirts of Dayton. I had researched good restaurants in the area and we found a gem – an old-world style Eastern European eatery which featured a smorgasbord of sausage, potato, and schnitzel treats – Elinor’s Amber Rose.
The Amber Rose was built in 1910 and features a bar with what at the time was luxurious Turkish marble. Their menu included turtle soup – where can you find that? It was definitely a neighborhood place and while we were there, about a dozen blue-collar guys rolled in to take a big table next to us.
After returning to our hotel, my travel partner retired to his room, and I decided to walk off dinner. After strolling around the hotel grounds, I encountered a white black-spotted cat who was trolling for someone to pet him, and then take him in. we overseas people have seen it before – a family adopts a pet, gets orders, and decides to dump it because they don’t want to pay the freight, medical, and other expenses. Heart-breaking.
It was pretty obvious that this feline character was from the same ilk, and he was looking for shelter, food, and love since he was obviously not feral, and unskilled in living off the land. He came right up to me, rubbed my legs – marking me as his territory, and then rolled around on the ground looking for reciprocation – which I obliged, being a cat person. After a few minutes of that, I went inside, with him trying to follow, and went upstairs for the night – troubled.
The next day, we completed our meetings, and I drove my traveling companion back to the airport for his return flight to DC, as I had some unscheduled business meetings the next day. After dinner at a great Colombian restaurant, I returned to the hotel and retired to the back patio for an after dinner drink. Who shows up but my new best friend, who camped out on my feet and stuck his claws into my pants as if to say “I’m not going to let you go.” I needed more information so I went back into the lobby, leaving my feline friend sitting at the door watching me, and asked the front desk guy what was the story with this cat. He told me that it had been hanging around the hotel for about three weeks, and a lot of the guests had expressed concern about him. It was forecasted to freeze that night and the desk guy said that the owner of the hotel was calling Animal Control to pick him up the next day, tomorrow. At that point, action was called for, and I was the right person at the right time. I asked the desk guy what the hotel policy was for pets. He said that they were not pet friendly, but added he had to leave the desk to inspect the grounds and corridors. It was time to make my move. I told him that I would shut the cat into the head, and clean up any mess.
I had previously told my wife about this cat, sent her a picture, and that I was thinking about bringing him home. She is also a cat person, and agreed to me taking the chance. I went back out back, tucked the cat into my jacket, and took him up to the room. Then I went out to a 24-hour store and bought a cat carrier, portable litter box, dried cat food, and bowls for food and water. I should have bought a poop scoop – more on that later.
The next morning, I called and cancelled my informal appointments, cancelled my return flight and extended my rental car to drop it in DC. I snuck the cat out of the hotel, checked out, and departed for what turned into a 12-hour journey back home.
I put the cat into the back of my rental car, and he didn’t like it one bit. Just outside of Columbus, he started to go ballistic, bucking up in his cage in an effort to get free, so I had to stop and get him out of there. I held him for a bit, his heart going 200 mph, and calmed him down. Then, I put him back into his carrier in the back seat so he could see me, and I could reach back and put the fingers of my right hand through the cage bars so he could nuzzle them. It worked.
About an hour later, he started to meow real loud. I found a truck stop off I-70. By this time, he had pooped all of the food he had been scarfing down from the night before. I called my wife with the opening line “I just scooped cat shit out of a litter box with my bare hands.” Yuck. However, my new friend slept pretty much the rest of trip, trusting to fate.
A couple of hours later and still in Ohio, I needed a pee break and something for lunch. I stopped in Morristown and spotted Schlepp’s Family Restaurant. It was the quintessential diner and by happenstance, the owner was sitting at the bar. I asked him what they were known for and what they offered off the menu that was good. It became a choice between a deep-friend cheese burger or a fried bologna sandwich on home-made bread. Since I haven’t had a bologna sandwich since I was pre-teen and never seen it on a menu, I chose that – awesome with their hand-cut fries. Great place to stop on your next trip out west. And the bonus is that it hasn’t been ruined by Guy Fieiri or any of the other clones on the Food Network.
The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. The fall colors had mostly gone from the mountains of West Virginia and Maryland by then, but still beautiful. I made my way through Morgantown, Cumberland, Hagerstown, Frederick, and to BWI without issue; dropped the rental car and loaded up the Tacoma for the short drive home. I called my wife and told her to lock our other cat into the basement since I was concerned that the new one might have feline leukemia – a deal breaker if there ever is one.
We got home, everyone got familiarized, the other cat very unhappy, and I slept on the couch with my new best friend curled up next to me.
The next day, my wife took the new cat to his vet appointment, women being the stronger sex. There are some things that I don’t like and make me afraid and this was one of those things – I had too much emotion invested in this little character and I feared the worst. I invented an excuse to be elsewhere; someplace I could have a couple of drinks, and then waited for the news. The first text from my wife was that he weighed 7 pounds, 7 pounds of pure love. The second brought me to tears– he had tested negative for feline leukemia. I got down on my knees and cried, and thanked God for that gift. I’ve got tears in my eyes as I type this now. Every once in a while, you roll the dice, and this time my number came up. So, we have a new family member, and he is a little heartbreaker. If you are a cat owner or lover, you will understand why I say that cat’s rule the universe. Have you ever gotten a cat to do anything? Well, I had a cat get me to move a little bit of heaven and earth to save his life, and get him a new loving home. I’m still awed by how he did it.
So, we don’t know what we are going to call him. According to Old Possum’s book, all cats have three names, including a secret one. There are some obvious choices – Dayton being one. We are taking a family vote later today. One of the exhibits I saw at the Air Force Museum featured their two greatest aces from WWII, Thomas Maguire, who has an AFB named after him, and Richard “Dickie” Bong – their greatest ace – but the only thing named after him is the access road to the Air Force Museum. He had 40 confirmed kills flying the P-38 Lightning in the SW Pacific Operating Area – more than any USAF fighter pilot ever, and won the Congressional Medal of Honor for those feats. However and despite his aerial achievements and being named as one of our first test pilots, he committed the cardinal sin of crashing an F-80 Shooting Star on an acceptance flight on the same day that Birdy Tibbetts dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima. Like all of the services then and today, the Air Force didn’t brook failure. That’s why there is no Bong AF, unlike his ace counterpart Maguire who had 38 kills in Europe.
There are several other name candidates – I like Dickie but my wife prefers Lucky, since he is lucky to have survived once he was abandoned. We still need to finish the work to de-flea and de-tick him since he picked both up while he was homeless. Either way, he is one happy camper given his circumstances 48 hours ago, and now where he is today. He is sleeping at my feet as I write this. The vets say he is between 7 and 8 months old so still a kitten. He will sleep in the crook of my arm for the rest of my life. I grieve for what I feel was a little girl who used to own and love him, but I am pissed off at her parents who hard-heartedly decided to dump his ass, for whatever reason. I truly believe that God has a purpose and a plan for everything and everybody. Everyone wants to win the lottery, sometimes you do, but maybe in ways that you never expected.
Epilogue: I wrote this last Saturday and it has been waiting in the Socotra line for posting. Lucky gets his little nuts cut tomorrow so now the little fucker has cost me around $500 – all worth it.
Copyright 2017 Point Loma
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