I’ve never been good at taking care of my car. As my troubles with Inga Beep the Jeep proved, I’m pretty awful at it, in fact. I don’t take the car in as often as I should and therefore, inevitably, whenever I do take it in, there’s something wrong with it. And so each time I bring my car in to be worked on, I sit there in the waiting room with all of the other less-than-proud owners, dreading bad news and the subsequent guilt.
The same can be said for pets. Yes, I had a dog when I was growing up and yes, he lived happily and healthily until he was 13, but he did so only because of Mama Benchly. I fed him periodically and I walked him occasionally, but my ownership responsibilities extended only to playing with him during the day and sharing a bed with him at night. Because all of the responsible responsibilities were left to my mother, it can be argued that she was his proud owner.
In college, my senior year, I had a few fish (as did my three roommates) but they never seemed to survive more than a month each. My roommates and I taped on the wall above the fish tank home-made construction-paper tombstones for each fish that passed on to the tank in the sky; “RIP Alexis – 9/2/98-9/7/98.” By the end of the year, there were at least 12 tombstones on our wall, each staring down at the still-alive fish, serving as a reminder to exercise and to eat only the recommended number of pellets per day.
At the end of the school year, the day before graduation, we donated the fish to the tank in the office of the Dean of Students. Considering that they were outnumbered and much smaller, if my life was a movie, I’d have been shown giving the commencement speech while a dramatic song (maybe with chanting, and long notes in major chords; maybe something by Moby) drowned out my words and the camera cut to a shot of our poor fish being attacked by their new predators.
When I adopted Othello from Montana Girl, I was fearful that I wouldn’t be able to take care of him. Even The Virgin Mary still thinks that I’m not up to the task; to her credit, I was definitely slacking in the food-purchasing/litter-scooping departments in the beginning; and to my credit, I’ve definitely improved since she complained. But then a peeing-outside-the-litter-box incident pushed me to set up a long-overdue yearly check-up for the little guy, and this morning, I found myself sitting with said kitty on my lap, impatiently waiting for the veterinarian to tell me all of the things wrong with him.
And so, as you can probably imagine, words cannot possibly describe the joyous feeling I had when the vet told me that my kitty was healthy and perfectly normal, and, evidently, “naturally gorgeous.” Although Othello’s ears perked up when she said that, you can be certain that his owner was the proudest of them all.
Benchly'sword 