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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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THE McELROY ZOO: Meet Henry, the tiny kitten who was dumped with a broken leg and a big heart

By David McElroy · May 29, 2011

Henry came very close to dying before I ever even met him. In fact, if a neighbor had had the least bit of compassion, he might have been dead. But because his suffering wasn’t worth anything to her, he became my problem — and he ultimately became a great source of joy for me.

It was sometime in 1992, and I hadn’t been living where I live now for very long. I didn’t know many of the neighbors yet, but I knew a number of the neighborhood kids. As I was coming back from a walk, one of the little girls came running up with a breathless story about a kitten under a porch who needed help. Here’s the story that I pieced together from talking to various people who were involved.

A woman who lived on the street found a tiny kitten who was injured, apparently after a dog attacked him. She took the kitten to a nearby vet clinic, where she found out that his right rear leg was shattered into a number of pieces. The clinic recommended putting him to sleep as the most humane option. The woman agreed, but then found out she would have to pay for it. She refused. So she brought the little lump of life and fur back home — and left him outside to fend for himself … and to die.

I would have never known about the kitten if Merritt — the neighbor child — hadn’t told me, because he was hiding under a porch, quietly shaking with shock as he slowly waited for what would have been sure death. It was night when I pulled him out from under the porch. I’d never called my vet at home, but decided this was an emergency worth making an exception for. He explained how to take care of the kitten immediately and said to meet him at his clinic first thing in the morning.

The x-rays confirmed that the kitten’s leg was indeed shattered badly. I’ll never know how it happened. The vet said that standard operating procedure called for trying to put pins into the broken bones, but that there was another old solution we could try first that might or might not work. He bound the kitten’s bones in place and then pulled the leg up to his little body — binding it tight so that the leg couldn’t move. He said that the kitten was young enough — and growing fast enough — that the bones might grow back together. He sent the kitten home with me, with instructions not to let him run around and do much for six weeks.

If you know anything about kittens, you know it was impossible to follow that instruction. By the time he recovered his strength, he ran around the house on three legs just as fast as a normal kitten ran on four. He was nothing but a ball of excited energy. He didn’t seem to know anything was wrong. He wanted to play all the time — at least when he wasn’t purring in my lap. When the binding came off weeks later, the little leg was growing — with everything in place. He walked normally for the rest of his life. You couldn’t feel or see anything wrong with the leg. It was a totally unexpected ending to a tragic story.

He lived without a name for awhile, because I couldn’t figure out just what fit this amazing little fellow. Then I decided that his tragic story with an unexpected ending seemed like something from a short story by William Sydney Porter, who wrote under the pen name of O. Henry. So he was named Henry in the writer’s honor.

(I don’t know what became of the woman who dumped Henry. She moved out shortly after this happened. Other than talking with her to confirm the facts of the story, I never spoke to her.)

Henry had two defining characteristics. One was the wild fur that caused someone to once say he looked like a screech owl. The second is that he wanted more “lap time” than any cat I’ve ever been around. He would frequently come sit at the computer while I worked and just stare at me until I would quit working long enough to let him get into my lap and settle in for a nap. I can’t count the times that he purred himself to sleep in my lap.

A couple of years ago, he started having thyroid problems in his old age. He lost more than half of his body weight and I almost lost him a couple of times, but the thyroid medication helped me keep him alive until this past October. After 18 very happy and loving years with me, Henry died on Oct. 15. The picture to the right was just seven days before he died.

I still miss this little cat who had such a big heart.

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

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: animals, cats, henry, kittens, rescue

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Briefly

It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode in the car with me. She was on her way to her “forever home” with me that night, but she didn’t know it, so she was terrified. It was a much happier and braver girl who took a ride in the car tonight so we could go through a drive-through window and order a hamburger for her — to celebrate five years with me. She had a great time. If she could remember five years ago tonight, she would be proud of how far she’s come, too. If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s journey from scared dog to brave queen of the household, here’s something I wrote after her first year with me. I’m hoping this girl will have many more happy years with me.

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.

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