Tag Archives: #cats

Corny, the pandemic kitty

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This story was published on May 14, 2020, but didn’t make it to my blog. Four years later, here it is!

One of the advantages in living in our community in Florida is the abundance of wildlife that surrounds us. In one week, we have seen otters frolic near our pond, crows attack a red-tail hawk, and osprey dive into the pond to catch a fish.Often, we look out our window and see several deer munched grass near the pond. 

 In one of my more harrowing moments, I barely missed hitting a male deer who decided to dash across the road in front of my bike. I thankfully stopped in time and watched two adults and one fawn continue their stampede.None of this week’s wildlife scenes, however, can compare with our encounter with a not-so-wild animal that briefly came into our lives.

 As Larry and I were finishing up one of our long walks around Solivita, we saw a friend of Larry’s from pickleball standing beside her bike and staring at the curb. As we got closer, a tiny ball of fur crossed the road, an animal so small that it took us a minute to realize that it was a kitten. We watched it dart behind some bushes in the front of a neighbor’s yard. After a few tries, I found it trembling under the shrubbery. 

Larry and I knew that we couldn’t just leave the tiny animal on its own. He (we checked!) would die of starvation or become an alligator’s dinner. We also knew we couldn’t keep him. Although we had had cats while our children were home, we had come to the realization that all of us were allergic. We had to find him a home with another cat lover who didn’t rely on Zyrtec to survive..

 I picked him up, wrapped him in the bandana that I had been using as an emergency face mask, and started walking the half mile home. It took me less than a minute to name him “Corny” for the coronavirus. 

While I gently held Corny and tried to reassure him that he was safe, Larry called friends who we knew loved animals. Kerry the dog walker. Jane the dog sitter. Doug and Barb the cat lovers. Teri who volunteers at a “cat cafe” where one can have coffee and pastries while playing with adoptable cats. In between the calls, we asked everyone whom we passed if they would like to adopt a kitten. No luck—yet

When we got home, I placed a laundry basket with an old towel on the floor of the garage and sat next to him. I took a picture of Corny and posted it on the lost and found section of our community e-bulletin. My next call was to a local veterinarian, who was not encouraging. He said that the kitten was one of many who were dumped in Solivita by outsiders. He also warned me that he probably was carrying fleas, parasites, AIDS, and/or feline leukemia and told me to call the county animal control so the stray could be picked up and—probably—put down. The Polk County contact initially provided some optimism: the shelter would take him in and try to find him a home if and only if he was weaned as they did not provide bottle feeding.

After several more phone calls, we connected with Brenda and Marty, devoted cat lovers who spend part of each year working at Best Friends Animal Society in Kaleb, Utah. The organization is leading a national effort of “No Kill By 2025,” They directed us to a woman in our community who is involved in Helping Paws, a local network whose mission was to rescue cats and find them homes. She was willing to take Corny, and the organization would ensure the cat visited a veterinarian for a check-up, shots, and neutering. 

I quickly called animal control to cancel, but I was too late as the truck pulled up to our house soon after I hung up. We explained the situation, and the person who was to take Corny away was happy we had found a home for him. 

As Larry drove, I held Corny and told him that he was going to a safe place. Diane, the cat angel, took a quick look at our kitten. She estimated that Corny was less than six weeks old, had a few fleas and an eye issue but was in good shape. She already was fostering a female cat with four kittens and was hoping Corny would be adopted by the mother cat. We gave Diane a contribution to cover the cost of the vet and said goodby. The softie that I am, I shed a few tears as we drove home. From the time we first spotted the kitten until we returned home, only 90 minutes had passed.

The next morning, Diane left a message on our voice mail: The mother had accepted Corny. Diane texted us a picture of all six cats. The mother was nursing three of her kittens and Corny. A fourth kitten looked on with an expression that said, “Hey! Who is this grey fur ball that took my place?”

On a check-in a week later, Corny, who Diane had renamed Snickers, was doing fine. “I overestimated his age,” said Diane. “Based on his weight, he was less than four weeks old.” While the other kittens were weaning themselves, Snickers had the mother cat all to himself.

Meanwhile, Diane shared with me her story as to how she became involved in Helping Paws. Like us, Diane and her family had a number of cats when they lived in their home outside of Boston and later outside of Orlando. When the last one passed away, Diane decided “No more pets!” 

Soon after that, Diane was diagnosed with cancer. After she recovered, she decided that she needed to do something to give back to the community. One night, she dreamed that a black and white cat showed up at her doorstep. The next morning, she found a calendar with a similar looking cat in her mailbox. And that day, a black and white cat showed up on her doorstep. Fifteen years later, Max was the “old man” in her home with two other cats as well as a string of over two hundred cats she has fostered over the years. I thought to myself, Corny now has a bright future, and we had our happy ending. 

As we celebrated Shavuot the following week, I could not help but think of the sixth commandment: Thou shall not murder. I learned that Polk County has a 50% kill rate for the animals brought to their shelter. That ranked them first in the state and tenth in the entire country. Corny wouldn’t have had a chance! In such worrisome, sad times as we encountered during the pandemic, it felt so good to be able to rescue this little fur ball. 

Unfortunately as predicted by the veterinarian, Corny did not survive. Diane emailed us a couple of weeks later to say Corny had died of an infection brought about by parasites that had overwhelmed his tiny body.

Still, looking back on our brief encounter, I never regretted our short time helping that stray kitty. We tried to help. As a result, Corny knew love and companionship before he passed over to the “rainbow bridge.” And that gives us some peace.

https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/local/polkcounty/polk-county-takes-the-first-step-towards-becoming-a-no-kill-zone/67-c8bb60b6-349f-4e5b-bf41-7649432aec7a

To learn more about Best Friends Animal Society, go to www.bestfriends.org.

Musings on Hemingway, cats, and anti-Semitism in literature

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Ernest Hemingway loved cats. I knew the minute I walked into his former house in Key West. Despite the beautiful day and the open windows, the smell of felines permeated every room. Our tour guide Doug introduced us to Gloria Swanson, Rudolf Valentino, and Betty Grable, three of the forty plus six-toed cats that roamed the grounds. All were descendants of his first polydactyl cat, Snow White.

I also love cats. Our family alway had one or two when I was growing up.  We had to give away two Siamese beauties when we realized that they were using the space under the claw toothed tub as a litter box. Most of the time, however, the cats stayed with us until they disappeared. My favorites were Romeo and Juliet, the former renamed Rebishka when “he” delivered a litter of kittens on my bed while I was sleeping in it.

When our children were young, we were given a stray that we named Fluffy. She died of feline leukemia three years later. By this time, it was obvious that Larry was allergic. This didn’t stop me from adopting two more. “The children miss Fluffy,” I told Larry.

Salty, the orange tiger, was more loving than his misnamed sister Cuddles, a calico. He especially loved Larry, who sneezed and sniffled every time Salty sat on his lap. 

One evening, before Larry left for a synagogue board meeting, he gave me an ultimatum. “Find a new home for Salty or find a new husband.”  Soon after he left, I got a phone call from my friend Diane, who is even more allergic than Larry. 

“The kids brought home a stray kitten,” she said. “Could you please take it in until you can find it a home?” I couldn’t say no. Within five minutes after receiving the orange ball of fur,, Adam and Julie had named him Pumpkin.

Larry came home that night to THREE cats. Fortunately, I didn’t need to find a new husband. A co-worker immediately adopted Pumpkin, and a few days later another friend adopted Salty. We were back to a one-cat household.

To no one’s surprise, Larry became Cuddles’ favorite human. The two of them often played cat ball. Larry would roll up a piece of aluminum foil, skid it across the floor, and Cuddles would bat it around the house. When she was fourteen years old, our beautiful cat disappeared one night and never returned. (A friend consoled me with the suggestion that Cuddles was “fox food”). We found cat balls for months. Ten years later, while in the process of installing  a new dishwasher, we found no less than twenty of them  in the briefly emptied space.

By this time, we realized that all of us were allergic to cat dander, but I never have lost my love for them. When I visit a house with cats, I can’t wait to pet them and hear that wonderful purr. So at the Hemingway House, I petted each one that got within arms’s reach.

At one point, I also loved Ernest Hemingway, so much that I completed an independent study on him and his writing in my senior year at University at Albany. The Sun Also Rises, Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea—I admired his sparse style, his characters, and his complex search for the masculine ideal. I was, as I have shared with readers before, young, naive, sometimes clueless. 

It was not until many years later that my opinion of the author changed. Reading his novels and other material about Hemingway from a more mature eye, I saw more clearly the man behind the myth—a narcissistic, heavy drinking male chauvinist. As Bernice Kert stated in The Hemingway Women: Hemingway could not truly sustain any of his four marriages. “Married domesticity may have seemed to him the desirable culmination of romantic love, but sooner or later he became bored and restless, critical and bullying.”

His relationship with his third wife, the American journalist Martha “Marty” Gellhorn, clearly demonstrates these characteristics. Resentful of her long absences as she pursued international stories, Hemingway protested, “Are you a war correspondent, or wife in my bed?” The final straw for Gellhorn (and mine!) was when she learned that Hemingway had convinced Charles Cobaugh, her editor at Collier magazine, to send him to the European front instead of his wife. In her excellent novel Love and Ruins, Paula MacLean describes Gellhorn’s reaction to the betrayal. “You could have gone to any magazine in the world, absolutely any of them. I didn’t know you had such a cruel streak in you.” Gellhorn found another—albeit more dangerous—way to the front and divorced him soon after.

Hemingway also has been accused of being anti-Semitic. As Mary Dearborn writes in a 2017 article in The Forward, the author’s letters were laced with “nasty remarks about Jews.” She states that in his first novel The Sun Also Rises, his character Robert Cohn is described as an obnoxious individual,  a “kike” and a “rich Jew.” Although some critics have given his writing  as expressing the perceived fashionable anti-Semitism of the 1920s, I now find his treatment of Jews in his novels to be disturbing. 

Should I stop reading Hemingway’s novels? No. If I boycotted every classic that contain anti-Semitic references. I would have to shelf huge chunks of English literature. including Shakespeare, Nathanial Hawthorne, and Charles Dickens. Even Phillip Roth has been accused of perpetuating Jewish stereotypes in his literature. The list gets longer if I add on other classics that demonstrate other racial and ethnic slurs

So I will continue to read Hemingway and other renowned authors with a little less enthusiasm and a little more critical eye. And maybe, in the future, I will have on my lap while reading a lovely, Balinese —or another of the seven “hypoallergenic” breeds known to produce fewer allergens than other cats. In a tip of the hat to my favorite Hemingway wife, I will name my new love Marty. Take that, Ernest!

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Gellhorn

https://forward.com/opinion/372351/does-ernest-hemingway-get-a-pass-for-his-anti-semitism/

https://www.petfinder.com/cat-breeds/collections/hypoallergenic-cats/

https://www.wideopenpets.com/story-ernest-hemingway-six-toed-cats/

MacLean, Paula. Love and Ruins. Random House, 2018

MacLean, Paula. The Paris Wife. Random House, 2011.

A version of this article originally appeared in the February 20, 2020, Jewish World News, a bi-weekly subscription-based newspaper in upstate New York.

Photo of Ernest Hemingway courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.