We went to pick up our little darling from his radioactive treatment. He didn’t meow until he saw me – then he didn’t stop. At all. For the rest of the day. Poor thing. Poor radioactive thing.
We chucked him in the car in the cat carrier, turned out of the driveway and promptly got lost. Soon after we got back on track – I nearly bolted from the car. As I was driving, this greatly disturbed Mom. She looked strangely at me.
“Oh my! I can’t breathe!”
She furrowed her brow as though wondering if I’d gone insane right then and there.
Then – all of the sudden – she gagged.
I rolled down the windows and hung out of it like a dog. It didn’t help. The cat meowed. I shouted over him. Mom laughed, squeezing her nose shut with her whole hand.
“The cat pooped!” I shouted, unfortunately at a red light with the windows open. “He radioactively pooped – in my car!”
Mom found this so funny. I did not.
We finally made it home and dealt with the poor creature and his radioactive poop.
(I mean, seriously, who has to deal with this? And a germophobe at that! It’s so crazy. Now if I’m ever in a room full of people and someone asks if they’ve ever carried radioactive poop at 50 miles an hour, I’ll have to raise my hand.)
Mom tried to reassure me that nothing actually touched any part of my car as he was in the carrier but still! I mean, come on!
Safely in the house and the radioactive feline clean and running around the house, back to his territory, Mom searched for her cell phone.
We gave up and looked in the car, she thinking it had fallen under the seat in the craziness.
I leaned my head so that my nose was flush with the underside of my car and asked her to call herself from my cell.
I heard her ring.
I turned my head toward the street.
I looked down.
Way down.
Mom heard it, too. “Is it under the seat?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Way under.”
I saw the flashing light of her display screen from the city sewer, what, ten, twenty feet below the city streets.
I found this hilarious.
Mom did not.
We couldn’t get the sewer cover open, even with the factory workers help. (Big, strong guys came with a crowbar to see if they could be of assistance.)
We tried glue and tape and curtain rods and yarn and everything we could think of. It was
Macgyver meets Martha Stewart and
The Three Stooges.
It was all for naught. I got the cell phone into a makeshift doily-type mesh of yarn Mom and I concocted but at the last second, it fell off and disappeared under the water and mud.
I called my sister to update her on the cat and inform her that she can’t call Mom.
“Well, she can,” Mom said, hands on hips, lips pursed. “But the sewer people will answer.”
My sister was a little confused.
After we got back into the house, hours after going to get the cat, Mom looked at me. “I wished I’d gone to work today.”
“I was thinking the same thing earlier!” I said.
But to tell you the truth, despite the horrors of radioactive poop in one’s car and losing a cell phone (that you had – you
had it!!) with the special little baubles she’d collected throughout the years and the zillions of phone numbers locked inside – I don’t regret this day at all.
Despite the sheer frustrations the day offered, I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much or so deeply and with my Mom.
I wouldn’t trade that for anything.
