Fun (?) With Cats

An excerpt from a letter recently written to my former down the street neighbor and fellow PCV Ashley:

So, I just buried one of my neighbor’s million and a half cats. I came home from work thinking, “Ah, its Friday. I have a three-day weekend laid out before me. Why not stretch out in the hammock with a stout and some Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and enjoy the moment?” So, I cracked open a Belikin (OK, not cracked, it was a glass bottle) and walked out to find... a dead cat in the storm drain directly outside my patio. No sign of a violent death, but attracting enough flies to have me worried about how long it had been there. I stood over it for a few minutes, cursing and wondering what the fuck to do, before decided that I at least owed it to the venerable cat lady to let her know that one of her brood had passed on. But the woman’s 92, after all. I’m not even sure she understood what I was trying to tell her. So I trekked over to DePaz’s son’s vet clinic, only to find that he was down in Stann Creek and wouldn’t be back for a few hours. What the hell does one do in this sort of situation? Next stop – Linda and Gustavo’s jewelry stand. They’ll know whether there’s a Friday night emergency dead cat pickup service, right? Mmm…. consensus is I’m going to have to take care of this myself. But Gustavo, bless his heart, decided to lend me a hand. I led him back to my place and handed him the fork my mom purchased for our nonexistent garden (which has been completely yanked up, by the way). I proceeded to wrap my hands in plastic bags and extract the deceased feline from my gutter. Not 15 minutes later and the job was done. I thanked Gustavo with one of the two stouts I’d bought anticipating a nice, quiet Friday night, and proceeded to get into a conversation with him about homosexuality. What a random start to this Pan American/Columbus Day weekend. And now there’s a dead cat under my backyard.



Sidenote: this is Linda and Gustavo's daughter Fabiola, who is in no way related to this story, but is adorable, and thus needs to have her picture posted.