The Loss of a Friend

Today was a very sad day. I lost a dear friend to cancer. He was a comfort to me when I was grieving the loss of my wife, who passed away in 2000. His first name was Luciano, but I called him Lucky, some folks called him Lou.

There was a story about his full name. It was given to him because each part of it told something about him. His full name was Luciano Houdini Tuxedo Vaughan.

I gave him his names.

Luciano - because his voice sounded like that of the famous tenor.

Houdini - because if I closed a door on him and he was lonely, he was able to stretch high up, grab the doorknob and turn it to open the door.

Tuxedo - because he looked like he was wearing one. He had a nice black suit on, with a full white cravat, and white spats. He was a good looking "dude".

Vaughan - because he quickly became a member of my family.

I was very sad and lonely in the months after my wife died. We had been married for 43 years. My granddaughters, Kaitlin and Bridget felt sorry for me and thought that a feline companion would cheer me up a little. They accompanied me to the Carroll County Humane Society and helped select a cat for me.

We knew about Lucky already because his picture had been in newspaper ads and on TV. When we watched all the cats in the "cat picking" area, the kittens and older cats were running around, playing and getting in trouble. Only one was laid back, kind of looking on paternally to all that was going on. That was the black and white cat we later called Lucky. We decided to pick him because he looked distinguished.

Lucky was of uncertain age. He was found living in a sewer in a Westminster cul-de-sac. We guessed that he was about two years old. He probably was a lot older.

Someone must have abused him earlier because for a few months he showed displeasure at being picked up or petted by scratching and biting me. My arms were a mass of bloody scratches. But after a while he realized that he had a good home with me and decided to cool it and be good. We became good friends and later he learned to like Elaine.

Everything went well until a few months ago. He began to lose weight and the vet said that he had hyperthyroidism. We began to give him medication and that was going fairly well until he bit his tongue and suddenly could not eat or drink properly. He would try to eat and slobber it all over.. then he would shake his head and spatter the walls and people nearby with food.

We put him into the vet hospital for two months, hoping that they would be able to get his tongue to heal. When we picked him up, the vet told us that his tongue was cancerous and was not curable.

In spite of medication and special diets, he continued to lose weight until he looked like a concentration camp inmate. Yet, there was still a spring to his step and he could still jump up on a chair if he wanted to.

However, two days ago, he stopped eating and drinking. I got him to take a few drops of water, but that was all. Yesterday, he could hardly get up from his little bed and today I had to carry him around.

He passed away today early in the afternoon and my daughter, Diane and I buried him in the backyard of my former home in Gamber, Maryland. This was the yard where I would walk around under the trees and in the meadow and he would follow at my heels. This was the yard where he would spend every night prowling.

Farewell, my little friend.. thank you for being such a comfort to me for so many years.

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Kindles and Bits (Ships and Cats)

Do you like gadgets? What red-blooded American doesn't? One of the newest gives us a way to read an e-book wherever and whenever we want to. I'm talking of course about the Kindle. Actually the Kindle-1, the Kindle-2, or the Kindle-DX (which sells for $489) I'd like to get in on this "reading revolution", but that's way too pricey for an old man like me.

If you are thinking of buying one of these reading devices, you might want to first check out Nicholson Baker's analysis piece in the August 3rd, 2009 New Yorker magazine. (Baker is usually a novelist: next one: The Anthologist to be published in September)

I don't think Baker was impressed with the Kindles and suggested that if you want to read an e-book, you might just want to buy an iPhone and upload the free "Kindle for iPod" application onto it. Much easier to manipulate and read book pages. Sounds good to me... however, at the moment, the iPhone is also a bit too pricey for me. Maybe when my income tax return comes in.... or when "my ship comes in"....

Speaking of ships coming in.. over many many years, my Massachusetts Vaughan family has been serenaded with lawyer promises of great wealth when Spain settles with the owners of ships that it sunk during the Spanish American War in 1898. One of the ships had cargo that was the property of my great, great grandfather, who had a few bucks. I don't know how much money in lawyers' fees has been extracted from my relatives over this promise of a fortune. Luckily, I have never been contacted. Would I have gotten hooked?

War reparations take a long time to resolve.. some are still going on from the war in the Balkans. But over a hundred years? Doesn't sound good to me. Since I am involved in warning people about scams, if my relatives get contacted again, I will have to let them know that I believe it is a cruel scam.

I'm missing my cat, Lucky, who is spending the night at the vets. He is suffering from hyperthyroidism and had been pulling out his fur. He had lots of bald spots for a while. However, recently he stopped that and has instead been biting his rear end. Also, he has been having a hard time eating. Today, the vet said that he had a hole in his tongue that had become infected.. and that was causing the horrible stink that he was wafting throughout the house.

So, Lucky gets a night away from us.. a nice bath.. some special medication and shots.. and he gets to come home tomorrow afternoon. I hope he realizes that this treatment was done to make him feel better. He is a very intelligent cat you know.

There were two appointments at 4 pm.. my Lucky and a Siamese cat also named Lucky. The Siamese Lucky was not happy to be there at all and was growling as only a Siamese can growl. I hope that our little Su-Zee never learns how to make those sounds. I read somewhere that a Siamese has a repertoire of 150 different sounds. So far, Su-Zee only knows a few of them. ......................................................................................

Lucky and our first Zuke

My laptop stopped working and the only thing that is working quickly on my desktop is blogspot.com, so I will do another blog, Today I will talk about my Tuxedo Cat, Lucky (alias Luciano, Houdini, de Tuxedo) and also about our first Zuke.

I think that it is Larry the Cable Guy who tells about his dog that has only three legs, is blind and deaf. His name is "Lucky".

Well, my cat "Lucky" is also not so lucky right now. He has hyperthyroidism and is pulling out all of his fur. He looks like he has male pattern baldness. Some parts of his body have no fur and Lucky walks around with fur hanging out of his mouth.

When he was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism, the vet gave us a liquid to give to the cat. Lucky did not like that and after he chewed up my arm pretty badly we gave up on the liquid. The vet gave us some pills instead and Elaine found a wonderful thing in her effects.. its called a "pill popper". I grab Lucky and hold his paws while Elaine "pops" a pill down his gullet. It works.

Every morning I get out the vacuum cleaner and suck up the black fur deposited all over the house. Some of it embeds itself in the cheap wall-to-wall rug that we mis-ordered before we moved in.

Did I tell you about the derivation of Lucky's names? (All my cats have been named Lucky as far as I'm concerned even if other people in the house have given them other names. My late spouse called my prior cat "damn cat!" Elaine calls this cat "Kitty Kitty".)

I used "Luciano" because when I got him, his crying sounded like Pavarotti. I used "Houdini" because he learned to open locked doors. "De Tuxedo" is of course a name given to all black and white cats that look like they are preparing to go to a wedding.

Lucky has a companion: Su-Zee. I'm sure I have talked about this Siamese fireball before.

Yesterday, we picked our first zucchini from our balcony garden. It was about 5 inches long and we cut it up and mixed it into scrambled egg, as a mini-melange. Elaine ate some slices raw beforehand and said that it was the best she had ever tasted. The melange was delicious and we are looking forward to more zukes. There certainly are plenty of flowers on the plants. Elaine's daughter, Emily, says that you can fry up the blossoms. We'll have to try that.

Our tomato plants are all starting to burst forth with little tomatoes.. even our hanging tomato plant holder has a few flowers. For some reason, we are not having as good luck with the hanging holder as some of our neighbors. I look at their holders and I see large amounts of greenery hanging down. We have a few light green twiggs with brown leaves. Maybe I will pull the thing apart and put in a new plant, if I can find one now that tomato plants are being pulled because of the "blight."

Next year, Elaine wants to ask the Village for a small plot of land on which to plant some corn. So, in my old age I will become a farmer again. What about that "old rocking chair" time?

Lucky in a Tuxedo

My Tuxedo cat, Lucky (alias: Luciano Houdini de Tuxedo) began to pull his fur out last week. We took him to the vet and found that he has hyperthyroidism, a rather common malady for middle age cats.. he's around ten years old.

Pulling fur out is one symptom of hyperthyroidism. Another symptom is weight loss, and he has lost five pounds since September.. this is quite a weight loss for a cat who weighed 16 pounds.

What do we do about this? We could remove part of his thyroid gland surgically, subject him to chemotherapy, or treat him with a prescription drug called methimazole. We decided, of course, to do the drug and since it might be impossible to get him to swallow a pill, the vet melted it down into a tuna-flavored liquid. We give it to him twice a day by means of a syringe. I hold him tight and Elaine opens his mouth and squirts the stuff in. He does not like this very much and kicks and scratches with all of his paws. Luckily, at least for now, we had the foresight to have his claws cut down while he was at the vets.

Unfortunately, after we started to get ready to begin the medication program, the vet let us know that he has a mild infection as well. We got an anti-biotic for him in liquid form and now we get to squirt him twice as much. The anti-biotic does not taste as good as the tuna flavored medicine and this adds to his discomfort. However, if all goes well, we may be able to discontinue the anti-biotic when the bottles get empty.

We have now been treating Lucky for two days and thought that we might see some quick results, but when we came home tonight we were greeted by a cat with a bald spot on the side of his stomach. Poor kitty.

My granddaughters Bridget and Kaitlin helped me pick Lucky out at the "pound". (I had recently lost my wife and was very lonely. The girls felt that having a pet would make me feel less lonely, and that became true.) He was the quietest cat in the whole building. While the kittens were running around raising the devil, he sat there like a New York Public Library lion surveying the chaos. At that time, he was a TV star.. his picture was being broadcast on Carroll County Maryland cable TV, during an ad for the Humane Society.

Lucky did not then, and not now, enjoy automobile rides. On the way home from the "pound" he made sure that he threw up all over the place. Once "home" he did not treat me as a friend. My arms and legs were a mass of scratches and bites for some time. However, by being very kind to him, even when I would have really wanted to strangle him, he came to tolerate me, and eventually become my good friend.

I named him Luciano Houdini de Tuxedo because of the following reasons: The sounds that he made at first, while he was being a bit uncooperative, sounded a lot like Luciano Pavarotti, and one night when I relegated him to a downstairs room so that I could sleep undisturbed, I was awakened at 3 am by his crying.. he was in my bedroom! How did he accomplish that when I had carefully closed the door tightly on the room he was in? This remained a mystery for some time until I saw him stretch himself up to the doorknob one day, turn the knob with his paws, and open the door! Hence his middle name of Houdini. His last name was given to him because he is indeed a black cat, with a white cravat and white shoes.

I call him Lucky for short.

A few years ago, he met Elaine's Siamese cat, Buf-fee. Besides a few hisses now and then and an occasional bop on the head when Buf-fee got on his nerves, they got along rather well. When Buf-fee passed away, I do believe he grieved for her.

One year ago, another Siamese cat came to live with us: Su-zee. This was (and still is) a wound-up energetic kitten/cat, probably related to a Meer-Cat.. from the way that she perches on her hind legs to survey the terrain. Su-Zee, at first, terrorized Lucky 25 hours a day. She would lay in wait for him to pass by and then jump on his back. I think he tolerated it because she was a kitten (whose mother had been killed in a barn by a "varmint" and therefore had not learned some basic cat politeness.)

However, after a few months, Lucky felt that it was time to let her know that he was the alpha cat in the household. Instead of letting her chase him and jump on him all the time, he now took the initiative once in a while to let her know who was the boss. She then gave in and they now have a kind of truce. Sometimes she jumps and teases him, and sometimes its the other way around.

Anyway, we want to make sure that Lucky recovers quickly because he is a vital member of our family and we love him.