Anne and I were living in our third rent house since our company's bankruptcy. It was a great house with a swimming pool and gazebo, but it wasn't ours. I had continued to make a semblance of a living as a geologist. The running joke during the 80s was MacDonald's suposed motto: "All our geologists have master's degrees," referring to the fact that many skilled oil people took almost any job they could find following the 80s oil bust, cooking at MacDonald's included.
Anne and I weren't quite there yet. The place we rented had a large backyard and a giant barbecue pit far larger than almost anyone could ever need. The large metal pit provided a wonderful shelter that a pregnant mother cat had somehow found. Days later, the mewing of kittens caught my attention. When I crawled beneath the pit for a look-see, I discovered Whiskers and her eight kittens.
Anne and I retrieved the animals from beneath the barbecue pit and ensconsced them in our laundry room. All the babies were missing fur and our vet told us they had mange.
"They probably won't survive," he told us.
Already reeling from the weight of too much defeat, Anne and I weren't ready to hear his prognosis. He gave us a formula, told us how to mix it and how to dip the kittens into it. They cried whenever we dipped them and Anne cried whenever the kittens cried. Somehow, they all recovered. Yes, every last one of them!
We named the mother cat Whiskers. She was a beautiful black and white cat with a patch of white on her chin that prompted the name. Her kittens were all beauties and we gave them all away except one, a black kitty we named Hamlet. As economic times grew worse, we left our large rent house and moved to a much smaller place - still a rent house. It was adjacent to a large apartment complex and we soon had inherited three abandoned cats.
Things were bad in the oil patch. Oil was trading for fifteen dollars a barrel and no one was drilling. You couldn't give a prospect away! Things turned worse when we learned Anne had lung cancer. I had somehow managed to sell a prospect and we had purchased health insurance. Thank goodness, because having cancer in this country without health insurance is a surefire way to die without treatment. Anne got her treatment but lung cancer is almost impossible to beat.
"Please don't let me die in a rent house," she begged.
Anne and I weren't getting rich but we had managed to staunch the flowing wound. We had developed a relationship with a local bank and had managed to keep their confidence. I knew with our severely damaged credit that we could never get a normal house loan but we had a friendly banker, a very religious man that realized all business decisions aren't based on the bottom line. Going beyond the pall, he lent Anne and me the money to buy the house in which I still live.
We moved into our new house with the help of many close and valued friends. Anne's health continued to worsen and I had little time for my kitties, or my dog Lucky. Shortly after Anne died, Whiskers disappeared. Somehow, I felt that she wasn't dead and I began driving past our old house, thinking she may have somehow wandered back there. I know that this seems unlikely, but two years after Anne's death, I got a call from a woman that said she had my cat. Dubious that the impossible might be true, I went to the house nearly three miles away and found Whiskers.
"I can see she's your cat," the woman said. "She practically jumped into your arms and I've tried for three days to try and touch her."
It was Whiskers. She was alive, a fact that I had somehow never doubted. I took her home and fed her, and she remained with me for another three years.