Mr. Bonkers’ courageous struggle ended today. Our loving memories of him will not. Maybe right now he’s frolicking with Mabel, Bacardi, Fuzzy, Oscar, Vixen, Max, Themis, Luke, Ben, and all of everybody’s other old friends. More likely, he’s watching TV while everybody else frolics.
Although we shouldn’t have spent the money, Mary Ann and I went to Providence, Rhode Island and thereabouts recently for a short vacation. I’ll be throwing up (poor choice of words) some highlights. First we have the whale-watching tour. Yes, it’s kind of hokey, and there were a lot of the same kind of people who call whales “fish,” but the whales themselves were incredible. It’s one thing to see them on TV, but quite another to see them close-up. I’m not a photographer and don’t have the equipment to do them justice, but here goes anyway. The photos are probably better than the video:
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Last night Mary Ann and I were talking about Chinese food. She mentioned that she’d heard of lo mein, but didn’t know exactly what it was. I said I thought it had something to do with totem poles.
She didn’t get it.
Mr. Bonkers isn’t doing well. Although the vets don’t know precisely what’s wrong, he’s suffering from severe fluid build-up in his lungs, pericardial sac (which surrounds the heart) and abdomen. He’s extremely listless, although seemingly not in actual pain. His breathing is becoming labored. He doesn’t move much. The vets are suddenly using words like “end-stage,” although they seemingly failed to diagnose the beginning stage and middle stage.
We’re proceeding with more antibiotics. We’re also reducing the huge amount of prednisone he’s taking. Prednisone depresses the immune system. With the dose Bonkers was on, he became susceptible to all kinds of infections, and some of them may be happening now.
I never thought the illness of a cat could make it difficult for me to function and focus on my daily tasks. I was wrong. And as heartbroken as I am, Mary Ann is that much worse. I keep telling myself that if it wasn’t for us, Mr. Bonkers might not have made it out of that shelter to enjoy five of the most-loved years a cat ever had. That isn’t much consolation at the moment.
Still, we have not given up.
After a tension-filled day of unpleasantries at work, Mary Ann reminded me of my promise to attend tango night at SummerDance. No way I was actually going to dance, but I had said I would go hear the music. Mary Ann, for those of you who don’t know, was born in Argentina. She speaks like where she was raised, though — Hillside, Illinois. They don’t even have a hill, by the way.
We took a bus to Chinatown and the Red Line downtown from there. Here are a few shots from the Chinatown station:
The only way I could think of to have fun at SummerDance was to mock people out and annoy Mary Ann. Childish? Yep. Do I apologize? Nope.
There was a guy with a blue blanket covered with images of skiers. He bugged me by standing in front of us, so I created the legend of The Ski Master:
doneThen I moved around for a closer view of the “dancing”:
doneOn the way back, our last CTA connection, the Cermak bus, took about 40 minutes to show up. Thanks to you, too, CTA. And you were doing such a nice job until then.
The bus did eventually drop us off at the Skylark, where the good company (aided by a few beverages) took the edge off the pain. I would have bought the Ski Master a beer, but he never showed.
I won’t say exactly how old Mary Ann is, but she was showing me a picture of a trilobite that lived in a pond where she grew up.
In honor of Mary Ann’s birthday, I’ve honored her request and posted footage of an aardvark and the giraffes at the Brookfield Zoo during a recent visit. The footage is special in that it’s the first time we ever saw an aardvark doing anything but lying in a motionless heap. Also, we caught the giraffes while they were being given a special leafy treat.
Lots of love, Mary Ann, and many special leafy treats in the future!
P.S. The binturongs send their best wishes too.
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I recently fell victim to a very nasty computer virus. After a lengthy struggle, I was forced to delete my operating system and start all over again. The scary thing was that the virus came from a program that had checked out clean with my antivirus program. I had a lot of programs installed on this computer, and it’s taken time to come back online. No important documents, music, or pictures were lost, though, since I keep them on separate drives that did not have to be reformatted. It’s just a big pain in the butt. Oh well. Stuff happens. Especially to me.
I don’t carry many photos in my wallet. One I do carry, and have carried for a long time, is the one above. That’s my dad on the right, with his youngest brother Louis on the left. It was taken at their mother’s house in Fairport, Ohio. My dad was nine years old.
I remember when I bought my first car. As I recall, the lot was actually located in a forest. The cars were literally scattered among the trees. I picked out a 1970 Ford Maverick. It was the most expensive car on the lot. It cost $400.00. This was not exactly a Lexus dealership. I remember the salesman saying, “You could drive this car to California.”
Well, maybe I could have driven it to California, but it would have to have been a non-stop trip. The brakes failed about as soon as we got the car home. Also, I couldn’t really drive the car anyway, because it had a three speed on-the-column shifter and I had never driven with a manual transmission before.
When I complained about the brakes, dad said something encouraging like, “You’d better fix ‘em, then.” And fix them I did. I got the book, grabbed some tools, and started hacking away. I’m lucky I didn’t put out an eye trying to take the springs off those old drum brakes. Dad wouldn’t do it for me, but when I was stuck, he would kind of wander by and make suggestions — suggestions that always seemed to help me make it to the next step. Between the two of us, darned if we didn’t fix those brakes. He taught me how to drive that bizarre shifter, too. Somehow I survived, and kept that car running all the way through college.
Anyone who knows me knows I’m pretty determined when it comes to solving problems. I owe that to dad. I never saw something broken that he couldn’t fix. I never saw something that needed to be built that he couldn’t build. That attitude rubbed off, although I freely admit that he’s still way better at most of those things than I’ll ever be. I can’t imagine a greater gift from a father to a son.
So, thanks for everything, dad. I love you very much. By the way, I do have a question about GFCI outlets….
Mary Ann’s very nice co-worker Jackie has taken a new job, and today was her going-away party at the library. Highlights captured by Mary Ann follow:
Two weekends ago, as I indicated in my previous post, myself and two friends went camping in Wisconsin, at a campground called Buckhorn about an hour north of the Dells. We’ve been there many times before. And, like many times before, a certain amount of suffering was involved.
There were two environmental themes this time: the wind and the mosquitos. They had a seesaw-type relationship. When the 35-mph wind would finally die down, the thousands of mosquitos would come out and play. As the only one who stubbornly refused to wear long pants, I took a lot of hits. I was slathering myself with lots of Off! Botanic insect repellent, but not with completely effective results. On the other hand, what I felt later was normal insect-bite irritation, not the dizzy neurotoxosis (is that a word?) I’ve felt in the past after days spent under a thick layer of deet. Plus, the bites went away normally, not developing into purple bubonic-plague-like pustules as they have sometimes in the past.
That being said, the trip was fun and goofy as always. It’s always good to be out with human and canine friends. Next time, though, Mike, Brian, Mack, and I will be staying away from the marshy area during hatching season.
