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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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THE McELROY ZOO: Meet Sam, the baby kitten I stole

By David McElroy · June 19, 2011

The first time I got a good look at Sam, he was flying through the air. Somebody was angry at this defenseless little kitten, so she threw the tiny ball of fur from her porch onto the driveway. The person doing the throwing never saw the kitten again. I stole him.

I don’t think much of people who let their dogs and cats breed indiscriminately. If that’s you, I’m sorry if it offends you, but we have so many cats and dogs being killed in shelters every day (and dying on the streets) that it’s irresponsible to be letting your animals churn out batches of kittens and puppies. Unfortunately, I have a neighbor who’s one of those people who doesn’t see anything wrong with it, so a beautiful gray cat of hers used to have two litters of kittens each year.

Sam was one of those kittens about four years ago. The mother and the kittens were never allowed into the house, so the kittens would grow up on the porch before starting to wander off into the neighborhood. Some would disappear for good. Some would get hit by cars. A lucky few would find homes. Then there was Sam.

I’ll never know what this woman was angry about when she threw Sam. I don’t really care. Nothing could justify what she did. When the little guy hit the ground, he started running in that awkward semi-slow-motion way that kittens do. He darted into bushes at the front of my house. The woman went back into her house.

I looked in the bushes for the kitten, but I couldn’t find him. But a little while later, I heard a faint meow on my porch. I opened the door and there he sat, waiting for me to pick him up. This little fellow wasn’t the least bit afraid. He was totally confident and very sure of himself. He seemed to love the attention and immediately started purring. Within a minute or so, he had balled himself up in my hand and was purring himself to sleep. (This is something he continued to do, as you can see in one of the pictures above.)

Since he already belonged to someone, I was torn about what to do. I didn’t want to leave him out there, but he wasn’t homeless — not technically. So I left him on the porch and went back inside.

A little while later, I checked again. He was still on the porch, sitting up and looking at the door — as though he was waiting for me to come back. I didn’t go out that time, because I didn’t want to encourage him to stay. But leaving the little guy out there alone was really tugging at my heartstrings.

When I went out the third time, he was asleep on my porch mat, as close to the door as he could get. It had now been hours and the woman hadn’t come to check on the kitten she had thrown. Without giving it any more thought, I scooped the little guy up and brought him inside. Other than for trips to the vet, he never left my house again.

I decided to name him for one of the men who had been important in declaring American Independence, because I decided he had come next door to declare his independence from where he had come from. So the little guy became Samuel Adams, and I always called him Sam.

After I’d had Sam for a few weeks, the woman who had thrown him mentioned to me that one of her cats was missing and she wanted to know if I’d seen it. She described Sam quite well. Without feeling even the slightest bit of guilt, I lied and said that I had no idea what happened to her cat. I also mentioned that I have two small cats who look a lot like him, though, because I figured if she was going to see him in one of my second-floor windows, she’d better have a reason to think it was another cat.

I’m not much of a thief. I’d normally feel terribly guilty for stealing anything. But stealing Sam was one of the better things I’ve ever done. He needed to get away from someone who would treat him like that.

Sam only lived for a couple of years, but he was a very loving cat who remained totally confident about himself and got along with other cats, with dogs and with people. I woke up one morning in March last year, and he was very, very lethargic — pretty much unwilling to move. Something was badly wrong with him, but I had no idea what it might be. I put him into a cat carrier and went to take a shower and get ready to take him to the vet.

By the time I finished showering, Sam was dead. I’ll never know why. He’s still in my life every day, though, because his picture is the lock screen on my iPhone. I do still miss him.

I have one good piece of news about the whole situation. Another neighbor and I decided to get the female cat fixed who was having all the kittens. My neighbor approached the owner and made the offer, which was accepted. Although the cat still isn’t being taken care of, she’s no longer having kittens twice a year. It was the least I could do for Sam’s mom.

Editor’s note: If you enjoyed meeting Sam, you might enjoy previous articles about Maggie, Henry, Lucy, Amelia, Charlotte and Emily.


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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: cat, kitten, neuter, pets, sam, spay, theft

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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