So, it has been another exciting week at Happy Meadows. Or maybe not so much. Well, for one thing Jackson has been throwing up a lot lately. He also started depositing nutmeg seed-like poos in the litter box again. So, Friday Mike and Judy took him to the Extreme Vet where they flushed him out and sent him back home. He is feeling much better now. One thing about cats, we will not let anyone know if we have a problem. It is instinctive self-preservation. Animals of prey will seek out sick or weak animals to hunt and kill. Doctor Brad recommended a new strategy to try to keep him from being constipated again. We will see how it works. I will let you know.
The other day Mike and Judy’s neighbor brought over some chocolate chip oatmeal cookies and a big eggplant. They belong to some kind of produce club that sends them primo vegetables and fruits periodically. However, they don’t care for eggplant. So they thanked Judy for taking the eggplant and Judy thanked them for the cookies. Truthfully, eggplant is nothing that would interest a cat, but Mike and Judy seem to like it. She cooked it up and made ratatouille. It came in handy as Mike’s break fast meal when he came home last night from synagogue. Jewish people go to synagogue on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, and spend the day in fasting and prayer. That is, they do if they see the importance of it to themselves personally. Although Mike is not a religious person, this is a tradition that he observes. He says he does it because of all the generations of Jewish people who were willing to die to preserve their way of obedience to God. He thinks it’s the least he can do. It’s also character building to miss a meal once in a while. It’s hard to relate to the suffering people (or cats) in the world if you don’t get a little cold or hungry yourself once in a while. And there’s plenty of suffering of both the 2 legged and four-legged variety. Just look what is going on in Puerto Rico right now. I might be wrong about this but I think the American president said that he would help them out as soon as they sent a check. Or something like that. But back to the eggplant for a minute. Mike said that the eggplant that the neighbors rejected is the cornerstone upon which our ratatouille was built. I wonder what he meant by that.
I don’t think there’s that many Jewish people that live in our neighborhood. But I could be wrong. I know the Blumenthals and Lowensteins live here, but the Blumenthals are Methodists and Lowensteins are Episcopalians (see Fake Jews posted May 26, 2017). My observation about Jewish people is that they are not really that preoccupied with sinfulness. Jewish Law can be summed up, according to Rabbi Hillel, by obedience to the Golden Rule…. treat your fellow man as you would hope to be treated. (Of course, one can get into more detail if one is so inclined.) So before asking God for forgiveness for any personal lapses that he may have experienced in the previous year, he is expected to make amends to his fellow man first. The other thing that interests me about God’s forgiveness is that it is sought by the entire community. I like the idea, and there is nothing in the cat world that would correspond to this sense of community. We might be missing out on something. The community part, not the forgiveness for our sins part. Because of our feline nature we cats are always living within the dictates of God’s Will. We lack the capacity to do otherwise. Even the cat behavior of “torturing the crippled mouse” is within God’s Will, even though people can’t understand it. Anyway, Christians have their own route to forgiveness and salvation, as do members of other religious faiths. What is true for you is not necessarily true for others. Some people have trouble with this notion, and this very thing has led to the worst imaginable atrocities in the name of religion. It is like I was saying in my most recent post, that idealism that lacks compassion can lead to absurdity. (It is a good thing to charge $100 for a bottle of water in a critical shortage situation because it allows the marketplace to dictate distribution of resources.)
The ugly dog contest is coming up again in a few weeks. Joker is the reigning champion. Joker is the Donkle’s dog that is not a White German Shepherd. I like hanging out with him. He does have a goofy smile, I must say. There is a part of me that doesn’t like the idea of an ugly dog contest, but what the hell, it’s really all in good fun. And the dogs are too stupid to know the difference. When Mike and Judy were up in North Carolina not that long ago they ran across a place called the ugly dog saloon or something like that. Mike took a picture. I was going through his photo gallery and ran across a picture of a dog even uglier than Joker. I’ll post it for you if I can figure out how.
There, I did it. Look at those ears and that nose. Only a mother could love such a creature.
