The Cats Pajamas

After four arduous months, the Great Experiment
has come to a conclusion. Last night we slept in our new home, half a
house in Watertown. The implications are enormous. We no longer have
to live out of a suitcase.  We don’t have to carry our passport
with us wherever we go.  We can remove the foam mattress from the
back of the station wagon.

We have to say, homelessness is not all it’s cracked up
to be. We are not trying to make light of the plight of the truly homeless.  The
nomadic camping out with friends we have done since April is a far cry
from the depressing reality of not having a place to lie down and die
in peace. On the other hand it is also a far cry from what we fantasized:
a carefree return to our hippyish youth, when we often left our apartment
or dorm room with a few dollars and psychotropic substances and didn’t
return for days or weeks.  Sometimes we would even remember where
we had been.

In those days it was a lot easier to leave home; there
was nothing really there but some dirty laundry and cold pizza in the
fridge.  It’s much harder when your whole life is stored in your
home. It’s near impossible if you have pets.

Tonight we recuperated our cats, who have spent the past
four months in the apartment of an Immigration attorney who is learning
Spanish from Norma Yvonne. In the eight years we have had them it was
the first time we had left them for more than a few days. They are
now exploring the new digs in Watertown.

It was
traumatic. We even started to dream about Chiqui, the 8-year-old Tom.   We’ve
been through a lot together.  We got our vasectomies
the same month (although his was more complete than mine). Sometimes in
the dreams he is a cat, but sometimes he is a human being. He is usually
mad at us for leaving him with the lady lawyer.

In
their honor we would like to direct your attention to the strange case
of Jasper, a thoroughly American cat, who was found wandering
in the streets of – Oxford, England! How do they know he is a Yank? He
was wired, with a microchip! And they STILL can’t find his owners.

A stray cat that was wandering the streets of Oxford was
found to have been registered in the USA when rescuers did a microchip
scan on it.

He said he had three theories on how he managed to get across the Atlantic.
"The first is that he’s a strong swimmer, the second is that he
belongs to Americans living in Oxford and the third would be that it
was a British
family in the USA who adopted him and then brought him back," he
said.

Or maybe he bought his ticket on the internet, where nobody knew he was a cat….

from Ananova