The Rest of the Story: The Return of Gandalf

Yes. We took our neighbor’s cat to the city’s animal control center, what I call the pet lost and found.

And yes, when we returned from the lost and found and pulled up in front of our house, the neighbor and her daughter were on the sidewalk, walking ever so slowly, looking side to side, and it was immediately obvious that they were looking for something.

“I bet they’re looking for a cat,” my husband said. So, I asked, “Tina! Are you looking for a cat?”

“Yes!” she answered.

“Is the cat white?” my husband asked.

Already, in the back seat, my daughter who is fifty and the CEO of a big time social service agency, was choking back what would soon become reverberating gales of laughter. After all, we’d rescued the cat, put it in a cat carrier, gave it a new name – Mitzi – and took pictures of it chilling on our long drive to the lost and found.

The cat had looked on its last legs. Frightened, painfully thin, scruffy, and slow moving in a hypnotic, slow loris kind of way. I figured the cat had been living outside for weeks. I say all this by way of fending off a new wave of mortification. Well, I was mortified. I’m not anymore. Not really.

We offered to help retrieve the cat and to pay for any expenses incurred. We (I) apologized 5,000 times, all while hearing the muffled laughter coming from our kitchen. You see, the neighbor’s house is not more than thirty feet from us, this being an old city neighborhood. We share a driveway with our neighbors, sometimes know what they are cooking for dinner. We (I) could’ve shouted over – “Did you guys lose a cat?”

It never occurred to me. Oh well.

Happily, the cat was retrieved by our neighbors. There was a minimal cost for a rabies update, which they thought was worth the money. And, they weren’t mad. “You did the right thing,” they said, and we all reflected on what might have happened if Gandalf, their 19-year old, decrepit cat had slow-mo’d its way into the street.

The rest of the evening, through a fancy birthday dinner and beyond, whenever anyone – husband, daughter, granddaughter – looked at me , they’d start to smile just a bit and then burst into laughter. They’d alternate this with assurances that we’d all agreed on the decision to take Mitzi/Gandalf to the lost and found and I shouldn’t feel mortified, and then new guffawing would commence. I remain a laughingstock.

So, there it is. The rest of the story.