When I got up this morning, and before I put on my glasses, I looked out my back bedroom window while turning on my computer.
I saw a (mostly) black cat luxuriously stretched out in the middle of the small grassy area of which the backyard of my townhouse is comprised.
“I wonder if that cat’s asleep or dead,” I thought.
I went downstairs, put on a pot of coffee, and was standing at my back door, peering through a raised slat in the blind, when Robert walked into the kitchen.
“Whacha lookin’ at?” he asked.
“I’m trying to decide if that cat back there is asleep or dead.”
“What?” he asked, as he came over and looked. “Well, if the flies buzzing around it are any indication, it’s dead.”
Guess if I’d’ve put on my glasses, I would have noticed that. In retrospect, glad I didn’t.
Actually, I have no reason to believe that this cat’s name was Earl. Also, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t curiosity that killed him. He had no cooties, and neither visible injuries nor blood, (Discuss!) about him.
There is a road about 100 feet back from the end of my back yard. Perhaps he was hit by a car, made his way up the little hill and into my yard, and died.
We found the number to Animal Control in the phone book, and I called.
“Hi, I have a dead cat in the middle of my back yard.”
“Well, sir, I can send someone out, but he won’t come into your yard. You have to put the cat in a bag, and put it out on the curb.” Where, presumably, at a later time today, someone will say:
Robert was an absolute dear (Hey, wasn’t he an absolute dear yesterday? I see a pattern here.) and volunteered to go into the yard and do the deed.
Armed with a huge black plastic garbage bag, and some bright yellow Playtex latex gloves, he asked, “Do you have an old towel or something to wrap around him? I can’t stand the thought of just throwing him in the bag.” What a tender-hearted man. I loved that.
I watched him wrap the towel around the body and lift it into the bag. Later he reported, “He was as stiff as a board. Rigor mortis had set in.”
He took the bag down to the curb at the intersection closest to my place, which is the address I had given animal control.
About an hour or so later, Robert walked back down to the intersection to see if they had come, and lo and behold, just has he arrived there, so did the truck from the City of Raleigh.
A rotund, African-American driver, accompanied on this fine Easter Sunday by a girlfriend or wife sitting in the passenger seat, said as he pointed to the bag, “That the cat?”
“Yes,” Robert replied. The man opened the door to the back of the truck, where Robert saw a big dead dog, sans bag, avec collar.
Robert said, “Not a fun way to be spending Easter Sunday,” to which the man said nothing.
As he got back in the truck to drive away, Robert said to him:
I had a delightful 3-mile walk around Lake Johnson today. I re-listened to a 30-minute podcast called, “What’s in a Face?” from which I plan to use a few quotes for my final research paper.
The rest of the way, I listened to music.
I met Joe for dinner at CiCi’s, after which we had coffee at Caribou in Cary.
There was a little bit of drama going on there, including:
- Two men who just stood in the aisle talking almost the entire time we were there, which was at least 30 minutes. Have a seat already.
- Some incident on one side of the parking lot, which resulted in the police being called. We think one car, backing out of its spot, hit another.
- A group of about five people on the other side of the parking lot (one of whom was wearing a long white robe and no shoes) just sitting on cars and talking.
<sacrilege>Being Easter and all, we wondered, about the one in the white robe, if he had risen.
Not long after that, we begot the hell out of there.</sacrilege>