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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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THE McELROY ZOO: Meet Amelia, the white kitten who was so filthy she appeared gray

By David McElroy · June 5, 2011

On a warm July evening almost 11 years ago, I had just left a cheap steak joint in Birmingham after a meal. I was about to get into my car when I heard a small sound. I was in a hurry, so I almost didn’t check it out. Eleven years later, I’m glad I did.

The sound I’d heard was a very small and very weak “meow.” There was a scared and hungry kitten underneath the car parked next to me. I got down on the ground to look. Very tentatively, two scared and hesitant eyes looked back at me from just around the edge of a tire. There was no way the kitten behind those terrified eyes was going to intentionally let me get anywhere close to her.

It took a few minutes of trial and error before I even got a look at the body of this filthy kitten. I could tell she had oil or grease on her face, but I judged her body — in the semi-darkness — to be gray and black. She wouldn’t let me get anywhere near her.

As I kept trying to coax her out, the people who owned the car came out of the restaurant to leave. Although they were mildly interested that there was a kitten under their car, all they wanted to do was leave. As they got into the car, the kitten scrambled up into the engine compartment, but I couldn’t tell where. I pointed down under the car, trying to get the attention of the man to, who was driving. He briefly looked at me and then looked away, as though he decided it was easier if he just didn’t notice.

As he started to move the car, the kitten came darting out, so I knew she was safe, even if I wasn’t sure where she ran. The other people drove off and I was left alone in a dark parking lot.

At that point, the smart thing probably would have been to move on. I’d tried to get to the kitten, but she obviously wasn’t going to let me. And now I didn’t even know where she was. I was torn. But then I heard her tiny “meow” once again.

It turned out that she had run under another car not far away from me. She knew I was still there — and she was watching me with wary eyes as she barely peeked out from underneath her new hiding place.

Since I’d just left a restaurant, I decided that food scraps might be my best chance to catch her. Even if I couldn’t catch her, I could at least give her a bit of food. So I went back inside the restaurant and found the woman who had been my server earlier. She was kind enough to let me take some meat scraps from a table that hadn’t yet been cleaned. I headed back outside with my bait.

With the first few bites, I just let the kitten eat. It was clear that she was very hungry, because it seemed more accurate to say that she inhaled the food than chewed it. As she ate the bites, she kept her eyes on me at first, but as I gave her more, she started to let her guard down. It was then that I was able to grab her by the scruff of her greasy and dirty body.

After I got her into the car, I let her loose to hide, because I didn’t have a pet carrier with me. She was strangely quiet and still on the way to my house. She willingly allowed me to pick her up to ride in my arms into the house. Other than trips to the vet, she’s never left since.

The upper picture on the right is from that first night, but that picture is from after she was cleaned up. It didn’t occur to me to take any pictures until after I had bathed her twice and she had eaten as much as she could stand. It took days to get everything off, but that dirty little kitten quickly adjusted to a life in a house with plenty of other cats and dogs. She’s turned out to be one of the most affectionate cats I’ve been around. Now that Henry is gone, she’s the biggest lap time cat I have.

The lower picture of the two smaller ones (above on the right) is from about six weeks ago, the day tornadoes hit parts of Alabama. It’s the best comparison I could find to the way she was sitting in the earlier shot.

The name wasn’t that difficult in her case. Since the kitten was so far away from any residential areas when I found her, I decided she must be an explorer kitty of some sort who had wandered away in search of something new, so I named her for aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart. My only rule for her is that if she ever flies, she can’t fly over the Pacific Ocean.

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

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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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