A Thousand Times No

When I was growing up, our family never had any four-legged pets.  If pressed, my father would remind us that he was allergic to both cats and dogs, so “regular” pets were out of the question.  We kept some tropical fish when I was in grade school, and also a few parakeets, but that was more or less the extent of our forays into the animal kingdom.

As I grew older, I started to question the severity of my father’s allergies.  “How come you never sneeze when we visit So-and-So’s house?  They have a dog,” I asked.  My father would explain that we had only visited for a few hours, so his allergies hadn’t taken hold yet.  But being around a dog for several days would pose a problem.

Later still, I discovered that having allergies to both cats and dogs was unusual.  My father assured me that either one would wind up making him sick.

Several years after I was old enough to realize that my father had no allergies and had been dissembling in order to dodge pet ownership, I confronted him.

“You’re not really allergic to animals at all, are you?” I said.  He smiled slyly.  “Why did you keep telling us you were?”

“If we got a cat, who do you really think would have wound up cleaning its box?” he replied.  “If we got a dog, who would have taken it outside in the wintertime?”  Not a trivial question in Minnesota.  We both knew the answer: Mom and Dad.  Having regular pets was hard.  Fair enough.

As adults, my younger sister and I both wound up sharing households with cat owners.  She often found herself doling out stinky servings of wet food for her landlord’s noisy, neurotic feline; I cleared plastic away from the ever-curious jaws of a howly, rail-thin black cat and her two plump, sheddy companions.

Eventually I took in one stray kitten, and then another.  A few years later, my sister started feeding a stray cat on her porch.  When my sister moved to a new house, the cat moved indoors with her, gradually forming a permanent, cat-shaped divot in my sister’s sofa, right at the edge of the picture window in the living room.

My sister put her much-loved cat to sleep this morning, after an extremely sudden downturn in the cat’s health that unfolded in less than a day.

Despite never owning a dog or cat, I suspect my father knew the truth all along:  The hardest thing about having a pet is no longer having a pet.

Farewell, Moochie.  You will be missed.

Tonight I booked a PhillyCarShare vehicle and picked up a trunkful of supplies for my pets.  As I struggled to carry an unwieldy 40-pound sack along the sidewalk and up the entry to my apartment building, I staggered past a woman who was out walking her Urban Retriever (more commonly known in other parts of the world as a Pit Bull).

“Hi, Buddy!” I said to the dog as he ambled past me.

His owner eyed the cargo in my arms, then cheerfully exclaimed to me as she continued down the block, “Oooh, my dog eats that exact same kind of food!”

Surprising, considering that I was hauling a massive bag of kitty litter at the time.

(Truly, there’s no accounting for taste.)

Today was the first Sunday in May.  In Philadelphia, this means it’s time for the world’s biggest 10-mile footrace, the Broad Street Run.

Mother Nature decided to provide an extra twist by throwing in record high temperatures over the weekend after April drew to an unusually chilly close.  By the time the starting gun went off this morning for the elite first wave of runners, it was already well over 73°F / 23°C and extremely humid.  The race coordinators had repeatedly emailed participants to warn them to take precautions against dehydration and overexertion in the heat.

Unfortunately, not everyone was listening.  For example, there was the set of runners standing next to us during the subway ride to the starting line, each of them clutching a Red Bull Energy Shot.  One young woman (whose bib was marked as belonging to a 27-year-old man named Bryan) polished off her entire bottle between two local subway stops.  My friend and I turned to each other, agog, as I quietly said under my breath, “That’s gonna hurt.”

We arrived in the starting area about a half hour before the race was set to begin.  In other words, with far too little time to navigate the porta-potty lines.  I eventually gave up and went to my starting corral, where a woman standing next to me wore an extremely disturbed expression on her face as she spoke with her friends.

“I just don’t understand how someone could do that,” she said, shaking her head.  As she continued to describe the situation, I learned why she was so put off:  someone had taken a dump in the Porta-potty she had just used…on the floor.   Eeeeew.

I reached into my race gear and offered her an antibacterial hand wipe, which she eagerly accepted.

It wasn’t until after the race that it dawned on me — if anyone gives a crap — that one the Runners of the Red Bull might very well have been the culprit.