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September 20, 1999 |
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star of the day |
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September 20, 1999 2 belted kingfishers Today's Reading: Running Microsoft Windows 98 from Microsoft Press
Copyright © 1999, Janet I. Egan |
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The mockingbird kept me up most of the night singing right outside my bedroom window. When I did sleep, I dreamed it was dawn and I was outside in a big field full of redwing blackbirds, robins, sparrows, cardinals, car alarms... car alarms? That's when I realized it was a dream and all those birds were really just my old pal the mockingbird. So, I wasn't too wide awake when I went to meet Martha for lunch so we could talk about the Purrfect Companions brochure before the nursing home gig. I thought I had plenty of time to mail the remaining newsletters at the Newburyport post office and get some coffee at Fowle's but ended up being late to meet Martha. Fortunately she didn't faint from hunger and Angelina's served us our salads pretty quickly. It was a little hard to discuss my issues with the brochure with the big screen TV showing Young Frankenstein, one of the funniest movies ever made, but we managed to cover the subject and finish our salads without getting totally sucked into the movie. We picked up Cooter, Squirt, Trina, and M&M, and after a slight delay because the drawbridge was up (the bridge is only ever up when I'm running late) we made it to Brigham. Each of us carried two cats, none of these guys are heavy like Tyler. We brought all four cats to Mrs. Littlefield's room so I could ask her if she'd be willing to be the brochure "poster elder". Squirt took to her so readily that he got to be the "poster kitty". Both Squirt and Mrs. L did a great job posing for me and I got some excellent shots. M&M turned out not to enjoy visiting even though she's a lovey-dovey at the shelter, so we left her with Mrs. L and took the rest of the cats on room visits. Squirt was good, and Trina was good, but Cooter was the star of the day. Cooter was born to be a therapy pet, I think. There's one lady who really loves cats and is often clutching a stuffed cat when we visit. When the nurses and aides on her floor heard I was there with Cooter, they made sure she was awake to have her chance to pet him. She wasn't clutching the stuffed cat, so I put Cooter in her lap. He immediately curled up and started purring. She held him in both hands and petted him. She seemed aware that he was a real cat. Her face lit up with happiness. So far so good. Suddenly, she forgot he was real and squeezed him tightly the way she squeezes her stuffie. Cooter just squeaked urgently but didn't bite, scratch or even hiss to let us know he was in trouble. I had to get a nurses aide to help me get him away from her, but he stayed very patiently making little squeaks. When we got him away, the woman started screaming "leave it alone!" thinking we were taking away her stuffie. Rather than just taking Cooter away, I held him where she could touch him but not grab him. He rubbed his nose against her! Me and Cooter visited just about everybody we could find on the second floor and a bunch of people back down on the first floor before he settled in on one woman's lap and dropped off to sleep. He looked like he was in ecstasy. The woman holding him loved it. She wanted to keep him. (We're working on getting a cat residing permanently there.) Squirt was rested up by then so I carried him around for a few visits with people in the activities room. The room wasn't jam-packed with people so I could actually get him around to everybody who wanted to pet him. One round was apparently enough. He jumped down and tried to hide under a credenza, so I grabbed him and put him back in his carrier. Martha was still at large with Trina, so I sat on bench next to the woman who was holding Cooter and chatted with her and anybody else who passed by while Squirt and M&M cooled their heels in their carriers. By the time Martha and Trina reappeared we'd already been there over an hour, so after one more pass around the activities room with Trina, we packed her up and left. The cats were glad to be back in their cages. Martha and I were both quite sweaty. It was warmer than I thought, and all that squatting to be on the level of people in wheelchairs is quite a workout - not to mention scrambling around on the floor after the cats under beds. I was at least as tired as the cats. Did I curl up in my cage and sleep? Nope. I had a severe attack of "last nice day" syndrome. It's gorgeous today, all blue sky and low humidity. The forecast for the rest of the week is rainy, so I figured if I was going to look for birds today was the day to do it even if I was tired and achy and it was late in the afternoon. The reported red-necked phalaropes failed to show themselves to me. As did the reported red phalarope, which when I was dumb enough to ask somebody else with a bigger scope about I got "You mean red-necked phalarope." "Umm, no, I meant red phalarope." "Well, that hasn't been seen since Saturday!" (This is only Monday, isn't it? Am I demented?) A van load of British birders on holiday arrived at Stage Island while I was having the above conversation. They were oohing and aahing over a very noisy flock of yellowlegs, exclaiming "both greater and lesser!" in their cute British accents with the exaggerated "t" in greater. They make it sound like there are two t's: great - ter. For some reason, that t sound is one of the first things American expats take up in Europe hoping to sound less American: that and calling the drugstore the chemist and a few other obvious ones. It just makes them sound like Americans putting on airs, not like cosmopolitan Brits, though. Back to our story, these were actual Brits. They all had little tags like ski lift tickets on their jackets reading "Birding Holidays". They were quite thrilled with the hordes of mallards and the yellowlegs and the belted kingfisher. They outlasted me and the red-necked phalarope guy at that spot by half an hour. They were still there after I'd climbed up the tower at lot 6 to see if I could see the phalaropes from there (but with the sun setting and the wind shaking my scope, there was no way I was going to see anything that small). Its being almost the last day of summer, it was rapidly getting too dark to look for birds and I still had to do some actual work (track down a bizarre problem with Windows Explorer for Zsolt). So I had to call it quits even though it's the last nice day. |
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Cooter,
Squirt, Trina, and M&M went to the nursing home with me
and Martha this afternoon.