Roto-Rooter to the Rescue

This is a happy little story that hasn't much to do with anything else going on in my life, but I'm in the mood for happy stuff.

Where I live right now is about half a mile from the nearest bus stop. At about the halfway mark there is a storm drain of sorts, a concrete box (with outgoing concrete pipes on either side) with heavy grates over it.

A week ago Monday, my mother heard a kitten meowing and traced it to this, but couldn't do anything to affect a rescue. She called Animal Control, but when they came out they neither saw nor heard it, so they left. A few days later we came across some folks with one of the grates up, down in the box with a ladder, trying to coax it to come to them, but we learned later they were unsuccessful.

My daughters were flipping out about this, of course, being small children with their parents' love of cats, but there was just nothing we could do.

Well, it was still there Monday & again on Tuesday, but I knew that time was running out, even though we and several other folks had fed it. Thankfully it's been a dry month. Tuesday my mother & I stopped on our way home, and with the help of some passing teenage boys we got the grate up that the other people had had open.

So I was sitting there looking at this tiny little kitten about six feet down, meowing at the top of its lungs, and I knew I could get down there but then I wouldn't be able to get out, not without a ladder. So I did what any woman would do.

I called my estranged husband. The man who has lately claimed that he can't stand to be around me. (No, I don't buy it.)

"Rob," I said, "how would you like to help me rescue a kitten?" That depends. Where was it? Was I planning to keep it? He was working.

I told him it was in a storm drain. "No. No, no, no, no, no, no. People get killed in those things."

Ten minutes later, if that, he was climbing down his ladder into the drain. I would not be allowed to go down there.

He sat down and called the kitten. Called it again. Shook an empty can of food at it (we used to get one of the trailer park cats out of our trailer by shaking an empty bag of food outside; cats sometimes are this dumb). Waited. Waited some more. Stood up, and finally the little bugger came within grabbing distance, so he grabbed it.

And it bit him.

He handed it off to my mother, who handed it off to me. I wrapped it in my jacket and promptly named it after Robert's boss, who is never ever to know about this incident. Unless someone calls him & asks him about the Roto-Rooter van parked on the side of the road and the drain tech in the culvert.

The trailer's bathroom is now blessed with a scant double-handful of kitten, black and white, who is really quite friendly and shows no signs of being rabid. We are in the process of trying to find a home for it, and Robert is once again our daughters' hero.

And I am left to wonder how many of our current problems stem from the fact that the man is genetically incapable of ever telling me no.