In April 2021 Sue and I had two black male cats, Giacomo and Bob. Giacomo turned seventeen in November of 2020. Bob was much younger, but we don’t know his actual age. More information about both of them can be found here.
The growths on Bob’s back started as tufts of hair a few years ago.
Bob had always been Sue’s cat. We had him for months before he would even allow me to touch him. During our unexpected time together during the pandemic he grew much more friendly. He even allowed me to pick him up a couple of times.
On Thursday, April 1, 2021, Bob had been lying on the rug in my office for most of the afternoon. This was unusual. Giacomo often slept there, but Bob generally seemed wary of being trapped in the office. He always tried to keep himself between me and the door. Perhaps he associated the office with flea drops, which he did not like. It was indeed the place in which I occasionally had surprised him by applying the monthly flea drops in the summer.
On this occasion he was about ten feet from the door, not far from my feet as I sat at my desk. I was working on one of my blog entries when Bob, whose vocalizations theretofore had been limited to very soft purrs, groans, and meows, let loose with what could best be described as a roar of pain. I could see that Bob was trying to rise to his feet, but his right rear leg would not function. He somehow managed to get up on three feet by leaning against a file cabinet. Every time that he tried to put weight on the sore leg, he screamed in agony. He made it as far as the doorway, where he flopped down on his side.
Bob lay nearly motionless in this position throughout Friday and Saturday.
I called to Sue. She came in to try to give him some comfort. We did not know what to do. By then it was time for supper. We let him lie there all evening. He did not seem to move a muscle.
Of course, we thought about what could have caused such a sudden problem in his leg. Our first thought was that those growths on his back had caused paralysis. I thought that he might have been hit by a car. However, he had no visible wounds. In any case, it was too late to do anything about it.
When I woke up at about four o’clock on Friday morning, my first thought was of poor Bob. I found him in exactly the same spot as he had occupied when I went to bed. He seemed to have no interest in food or water, which was very unusual for him. At one point Giacomo came over to see what the fuss was about. Bob let out a roar, which Giacomo correctly interpreted as a demand for privacy.
Sue arose from bed to take her medicine at 8:30. When she came in to see Bob, he got up on three legs and stumbled into the hallway. He lurched about ten feet to the end of the hall, where he once again lay on his side after giving voice to cries of pain once or twice.
I did not witness this part: Sue brought Bob a small bowl of water. She set it down near his head. He eagerly lapped up some water without getting to his feet. Almost immediately he gave out another plaintive cry and started to pee. He peed all over the floor, something that he had absolutely never done in all of the years that he had lived with us. He struggled his way to his feet again while we cleaned up the mess. He made it the few feet back to the doorway to the office, where he lay down again. He there in that position all day, neither eating nor drinking.
I was absolutely convinced that Bob would be dead when I awoke on Saturday morning. He was neither eating nor drinking. I wondered what we would do with his body. My knees were certainly no longer up to the task of digging graves for pets.
I was wrong, but not by much. Bob was still in the same place and physical position when I awoke on Saturday morning. He did not move his head when I carefully walked past him into the office. I offered him some water, but he was not interested, or he may have just been too weak.
Bob may have moved a little during the day or evening on Saturday, but I don’t think that he ever tried to get up. When I went to bed on Saturday night he was in the same position as he had been on Friday night. I knew that cats were very tough. I just wondered how long he would be able to hold on.
On Easter Sunday morning I was quite surprised to discover that Bob was no longer in the doorway. He had moved back to the position he had assumed on Thursday near my feet. I wondered how in the world he got there. With some trepidation I checked him. He was definitely still alive.
After I fixed my tea and sat down I was gobsmacked to see Bob walk past the file cabinet toward the door. He was moving slowly, and he was noticeably limping, but he was walking and he was not wailing or even whimpering. He gingerly put weight on his right rear paw. I followed him into the kitchen, where the food and water bowls for the cats were. He slurped a drink while I freshened up the Cat Chow.
I went down to the basement to bring the cats’ litter box1 upstairs. I placed it in the hallway near the door to the garages. I showed Giacomo where I had moved it. I had to hope that Bob could figure it out on his own. I did not want to disturb him any more than necessary.
Within a month Bob felt comfortable exploring the junk piled up in our back yard.
For a couple of days Bob took it easy. By Wednesday he and Giacomo were associating again. Bob was walking more slowly, but he was definitely using his right rear leg. When he arose from lying down—which he still did a great deal—he was a little shaky for a few steps. Sometimes he even dragged his right rear leg. However, he seemed to get a little better every day.
Back where it should be.
By the middle of May I had seen Bob go up and down the two steps on the deck. I wondered if he could manage the twelve stairs to and from the basement.
On June 4 I went downstairs to empty the water container of the dehumidifier. I found Bob sleeping placidly on a rug in the basement. I immediately deduced that he was capable of managing the stairs and moved the litter box downstairs to its original position. I carried Giacomo downstairs so that he could see that the litter box had been moved again.
Bob is not comfortable with me carrying him yet, but he figured out the location of the litter box on his own. Maybe Giacomo told him.
Was this a true Easter miracle, or did Bob merely use up one of his nine lives? Who knows?
1. I don’t like the idea of maintaining a litter box. The cats have their own door. For more than three decades our cats have cheerfully deposited their excrement outdoors. At some point in 2020 this pair decided to use part of the basement floor as a non-flushing toilet. I had to clean up a big smelly mess. I decided that putting a litter box there for them was the lesser of two evils. Don’t even ask about trying to train a seventeen-year old cat to change his habit.
In the latter half of 1986 Sue and I realized that a serious business required a better office space than our house in Rockville could provide. For one thing we realized that neither of us was a salesman, and the building offered no place for a salesman to work. It was also a little embarrassing to bring in clients, especially since we now had two cats in residence, Jake and Rocky.
Google took this photo of the west side of 178 N. Maple. The large building on the left was already there. Our space was in the addition on the right. The entrance to TSI was the white door on the far right on the other side of the wall.
At the same time Sue’s dad was in the process of converting one of his barns at 178 N. Maple in Enfield, two doors north of Sue’s parents’ house, into office space for the Slanetz Corporation. Sue worked her magic with him to design a headquarters for TSI there as well. The new building also was designed to serve as a headquarters for Moriarty Landscaping1 in the basement below TSI’s space.
This is the view from the south. The drainpipe in the middle roughly approximates the border between TSI and Slanetz Corp.
Two doors allowed access to TSI’s offices. The first was on the east side, where our space bordered on that of the Slanetz Corporation. The other was on the south side. It was eight or ten feet below the level of the office. From the door a staircase led up to the middle of TSI’s office space
That arrangement meant that a good bit of the space on the west side—between the staircase and the west wall—was essentially wasted2. There was not enough room for both a corridor and a work area.
The north and east sides of TSI’s area had no windows. The west side had two sets—the double in Sue’s office and another one in the wasted area. The south side had three windows.
I found some of the partitions in our basement.
Sue bought white wooden shelves that were deployed to create a corridor from the door on the west wall almost to the stairs. The programming and reception/accounting areas were partitioned into work areas with dividers.
South of the building was a parking lot that could hold eight or nine cars.
Sue and I were well aware that we had enjoyed a sweetheart deal in our lodging in the front house of the Elks Club in Rockville. Since January of 1980 we had rented—without a lease—a nice old three-bedroom house with another room that was large enough for an office for three or four people. We paid the Elks, as I recall, $300 per month, we had no lease, and no one ever bothered us. On the first of every month we put the check in an envelope labeled “Rent”, walked it up to the Elks Club bar, and gave it to the bartender. I don’t think that we ever missed a payment.
In October of 1986, Sue received the following letter from the Elks Club:
October 16, 1986
Sue Comparetto TSI Tailored Systems 9 North Park St. Rockville, CT 06066
Dear Ms. Comparetto:
This letter is to inform you of several changes which are taking place in the landlord/tenant relationship between the Rockville Elks and you. From now on, all correspondence is to be directed to the Chairman, Board of Trustees. Until April 1, 1987 this is David Mullins3 (address and phone number below), All correspondence should be directed to the Chairman at his personal residence. When a new Chairman takes over, you will be informed and given any necessary address changes. Normally, this will occur every April.
Rent payments are to made as they are now except that the full rent is to always be paid. Do not deduct for anything unless authorized by the Chairman – no other member of the Board of Trustees has this authority.
New rental rates will be taking effect as well (a lease is enclosed). Your new lease will run from April 1 to March 31. For your benefit, we are phasing in the rental increases until April 1, 1987 (when the new lease takes effect). Starting December 1, 1986 your new rent is as follows:
Additionally, you are now responsible for minor repairs and maintenance totalling less than $100. Starting with your new lease (4/1/87 – 3/31/88) you will receive a $100/moth rent credit if you meet the following conditions. First, the rent must be received on time (by the 5th day of every month). Second, all minor repairs and maintenance described above are to be taken care of by you. This credit may be deducted off of your rent payment. If you fail to meet both of these requirements you forfeit the rental discount for that month.
Please sign both copies of the enclosed lease and return them to me ASAP. I will sign one and return it to you.
David Mullins
We did not sign the lease. Instead, Sue negotiated a temporary arrangement with the Elks Club for us to stay a few months until we could find another place. We paid more than $300/month, but nothing close to $11004. Sue has told me that we actually paid them $600/month. Evidently they did not want to try to find another tenant.
We moved all of TSI’s stuff over a weekend in early 1988. I don’t remember if we hired a moving company or not. I don’t recall lifting desks, and so I suspect that we hired some local people to do it. If someone helped us, we might have been able to do it. The Slanetzes had an old grey pickup truck. My recollection is that I brought most of the computer equipment in my Celica, which was a hatchback.
On Friday we were doing business out of Rockville. On Monday our headquarters was in Enfield.
For a few months Sue and I commuted from Rockville to Enfield. Since we worked drastically different schedules—she is a night owl; I am an early bird—we always brought two cars.
This is the view from North St. looking north. Hamilton Court is on the right. The living room is to the left of the front door. The window to the right of the door is now my office. The double window is on the largest of the bedrooms, which is now called (inappropriately) Sue’s sewing room. The other bedroom is directly across the corridor from this room.
Near the office Sue found two houses that were for sale. We ended up purchasing the one shown above situated on a very large corner lot at 41 North St. in the Hazardville section of Enfield. From North St. in 2021 it still looked much like it did when we bought it in 1988. The maple trees were much smaller at that time, and the Burning Bush on the left must have grown to be ten times as large as it was then.
The lawn in 2021 undoubtedly had far more weeds. Both the previous resident and the one before him were reportedly landscapers. Their care for the lawn amounted to an obsession. One of them even installed a sprinkler system. The first time that I mowed the lawn with my new Sears lawnmower, I filled twenty-three large black garbage bags with clippings. It took me over three hours. For the second mowing I set the machine to mulching mode and never set it back.
I undid all of that TLC with a few years of neglect. As you can see from Google’s photo, it still looks fine.
The sidewalk was added on the south side between April 22, the day on which we signed the mortgage for $135,000, and some time in June when we finally finished moving in. On the west side of the house was a fence. Beyond it was a driveway and walkway leading to Hazard Memorial Elementary School, which Sue had attended decades earlier.
So, our lot actually bordered on only one other dwelling, 1 Hamilton Court.
Behind the house was a one-car attached garage. Between the house and the garage was an entryway that was about 10′ by 15′. We installed one of the Datamasters and the daisy-wheel printer on a long table in that room5.
The house had a rather small kitchen, a pretty large area for a living and dining area, one bathroom, and three small bedrooms. To that extent it reminded me of the house on Maple St. in Prairie Village, KS, in which my family lived from 1954-1962.
We had accumulated a lot more stuff during our years in Rockville. For weeks I filled up my Celica before I drove to work every morning and emptied it at the new place before I returned home. Even so we had to hire movers to move the big items.
Our bed went in one bedroom and another double bed appeared from somewhere6 in another, which was in theory a guest room. The other bedroom became a kind of library. The barnboard shelve were located there. It soon hosted another resident, Buck Bunny, as is described here.
This house, thankfully, had much more storage space—a full basement and an attic. That was only sufficient for a year or two. The garage was soon too filled with Sue’s junk for a car—or anything else—to fit.
This is actually the current door. The old one was fitted inside the square on the right.
We made one important improvement to the house. We installed a cat door in the basement window that was below the guest bedroom. Some wooden shelves were already in the basement near that window. The cats entered on the top shelf. I built a make-shift ramp so that they could easily get down, but they often preferred to walk to the edge of the shelf and jump from there to the washing machine and then the floor.
1. In 2021 Moriarty Landscaping still occupied the basement area of 178 N. Maple in 2021.
2. I wondered why the entrance was placed there instead of next to the east wall, with the steps outside. Sue said that she thought that it might have been a town requirement for two fire exits. My other question was why the staircase could not have been to the immediate left of the door.
3. In 2021 David Mullins apparently lived in Farmington.
4. $1100 might have seemed like a fair price on paper. However, there were at least three major drawbacks to the property: 1) The ceiling in the living room/dining room space was severely cracked. The middle was at least 6″ lower than on the edges. It was a pretty scary situation. 2) There was no shower on the floor with two bedrooms, only a bath tub. 3) The heating bills were outrageous. A great deal of the hot air went right up the staircase to the unused floor.
5. The garage and the entryway were eliminated during the renovation that is described here.
6. Prior to this move I had not realized that Sue was a hoarder. When I met her she had almost no material possessions. Over the decades she amassed so much stuff—mostly of no evident value or utility—that we could not invite people to the house, and when we needed a repairman or cleaner, we needed to scramble to make room.
In 1988 Rocky and Jake, the two cats that had adopted us as caretakers a couple of years earlier, made the move with Sue and me from Rockville to Enfield. After spending their first winter indoors in Rockville, they had been allowed to roam in the neighborhood of the Elks Club. They always came back to one of our doors when they wanted food, shelter, or a massage. They seemed to have learned what was dangerous, although for Rocky earning the knowledge probably knocked him down to eight lives, as explained here.
Neither seemed to have much difficult adjusting to the change of scenery. There was so much more for them to explore, both inside and out. Rocky particularly liked the fact that when he was outside he could leap up to the windowsill near the dining area and gaze through the window at the activity going on inside. After we started opening the window for him when he did so, this became his preferred form of ingress. Rocky was a real leaper. None of our other cats ever attempted this feat.
Rocky and I watched football games. Popcorn was one of the few human foods he did not like.
Rocky loved to be petted. His favorite technique was the full-body massage, but he would accept any kind of petting by just about anyone whom he knew well.
Jake was a much more private cat. He always seemed to pick a corner and sit there silently analyzing the situation. He tolerated a little petting as the price to be paid for a constantly full bowl of Purina Cat Chow.
The night of October 31, 1988, was a sad one. Sue and I went out for supper, as I remember, and when we came back we found Jake’s dead body on the street. I buried him in the yard, but I don’t remember where.
Sue and I did not feel devastated at Jake’s demise. We had lost quite a few pets by that time. We liked Jake, and we missed him, but neither of us had formed a strong attachment to him.
I don’t remember where our next pet, Buck Bunny, a very large grey and white rabbit with long floppy ears, came from. I am quite certain that I had nothing to do with the acquisition, but Sue had no recollection of us even having a rabbit during this era until I showed her his photo. Buck’s home was a large wire cage in the westernmost small bedroom. The barnboard bookshelves were also in that room. It was a sort of library, but it held as many games as books.
We kept Buck in his cage most of the time because, like most rabbits, he had an instinct to gnaw on things. Before we released him from the cage, we placed all electrical cables up out of his reach. That was possible because, unlike Slippers (described here), he was not much of a leaper.
Sue visited her friends Diane and Phil Graziose in St. Johnsbury, VT, pretty regularly. Sometimes I joined her, but just as often she went by herself. On one of those solo trips she brought home a tiny tan and white kitten. It was so small that it fit in the breast pocket of her flannel shirt. the mandatory state uniform of Vermont.
The kitten was one of many feline denizens of the trailer park in which the Grazioses lived. It probably should have been allowed to nurse for another week or so. However, this was probably the best chance that it would ever get to avoid spending a Vermont winter outdoors. The situation worked out well. We gave him milk for a few days, and then he found the bowl of Cat Chow and the water bowl on his own.
Rocky enjoyed exploring the big yard.
Rocky had little use for the pipsqueak, but the kitten immediately made friends with Buck Bunny. They really hit it off. The kitten liked to sit near Buck’s cage, and when Buck came out they played together or just snuggled.
When the kittne was more mature we got it fixed, of course. By then it had become rather obnoxious, and so we were not a bit surprised when we learned that it was a tom. I named him Woodrow1 after Woodrow F. Call, one of the protagonists of my favorite novel of all time, Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry.
After his medical procedure Woodrow decided that I was his buddy. He loved to take naps next to me. Almost any time that I went into the bedroom and got into bed, Woodrow climbed up to join me.
Meanwhile, Rocky had claimed Sue as his BFF. When Sue and I sat in the living room chairs (purchased used from Harland-Tine Advertising, which is described here, and draped with white cloth) Woodrow sat on my lap and Rocky found Sue’s. The two cats were totally different.
A very young Woodrow.
Woodrow liked all people. Whenever anyone visited us, Woodrow greeted them immediately. Rocky usually hid.
Rocky loved almost any kind of human food; Woodrow liked only Cat Chow and ice cream.
Woodrow was a hunter; Rocky preferred to snuggle. He exalted in his full-body massages.
Woodrow liked to be carried with his back down and all four legs up. Rocky did not mind being picked up, but he insisted on the chest-to-chest method.
Woodrow liked the top of his head to be rubbed hard, but any other style of petting annoyed him.
Woodrow climbed trees (although he usually waited to be helped down); Rocky never did.
Rocky was mostly silent. In his later years Woodrow gave off all manner of soft sounds as he walked around. I called them his “play-by-play”. Except for that one time in the flea bath he preferred not to speak English.
Woodrow and Rocky eventually became buddies. When I returned home after work, they were almost always together on the lawn next to the driveway waiting for me. The sight of them always cheered up, no matter how rough the day had been. I often sang to myself, “with two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard.” Our house was indeed a very fine house.
However, Woodrow did not abandon his first friend, the lagomorph. He still like to lie or sit next to Buck’s cage, and when we let Buck out, the two still socialized.
Actually, they socialized too much. Buck tried to hump the fully grown Woodrow whenever they were together, and Woodrow put up with it. It wasn’t just a phase, either.
Sue and I decided that we needed to get Buck Bunny fixed. I loaded him inside his cage into Sue’s car, and she drove him to the vet. She explained the problem to the doctor. He examined Buck and reported to Sue that “Buck” was actually a female.
Sue asked him why the rabbit was engaging in these activities if he was not even a male. The vet replied that he was only a veterinarian, not a psychiatrist. So, we still let the two buddies hang out together. If the rabbit (who was by then officially renamed Clara, after my mother’s mother, Clara Cernech, who had died in 1980) got too amorous, we just put her back in her cage.
I don’t remember the circumstance of Clara’s death. She was a French Lop, a breed with a lifespan of only five years. She was fully grown when we adopted her.
My favorite moments with Woodrow and Rocky were when I came home for lunch in the summertime. Both cats napped under bushes. Rocky customarily slept in the cluster of forsythia bushes in the northeast corner of our lot. Woodrow favored the burning bush halfway between the house and the driveway to Hazard Memorial School.
The one-piece table in the background was repurposed as a place to pile dead branches when we got the red one.
I liked to eat my lunch while sitting at the picnic table in the yard and reading a book.When I brought my food (no matter what was on the menu) out to the picnic table, Rocky stumbled groggily out from his resting spot. He sat on the ground next to me for a while and looked up hopefully. Then he raised his front paws up to the bench and nudged my elbow with his snout. Eventually he often leapt up on the table. He knew it was not allowed, but he could not help himself.
I always broke down and gave him a tiny piece of meat. No matter how small the morsel was, he purred loudly while he ate it, got down, and retreated back to his bush to finish his nap.
A mole’s-eye view of Woodrow.
After lunch I usually took a short nap in the yard on a mat or blanket. As soon as I had made myself comfortable, Woodrow emerged from his bush to check out what I was doing. I always slept on my side. After I had assumed the sleeping position, Woodrow walked up so that he was about a foot from my chest. He then flopped over toward me, and we both stacked a few z’s.
In inclement weather they repeated their tag-team act. Rocky begged for food at the table in the dining area, and Woodrow climbed up on the bed to join me for a nap.
The boudoir with the modesty curtain held open by the hamper.
When he was not napping with me, Woodrow moved from place to place in search of the best locations for sleeping. One of his favorite places was on a towel in the small storage area in the bathroom. He arrived there by jumping up on the clothes hamper. He then moved aside the curtain with one of his front paws and sprang into the niche. I called this obscure hidey-hole “Woodrow’s boudoir”. Occasionally when someone used the toilet or the shower, he startled people when he stuck out his head from behind the curtain to look at them with sleepy eyes.
Woodrow preferred Cat Chow to all other forms of food except ice cream. The only time that he paid much attention to Sue was when she sat down with a bowl of ice cream. Then he became more of a beggar than Rocky.
Although Woodrow loved to hunt, he was not possessive about his catches and kills. He often was seen parading around the house with a mouse in his mouth. Sometimes he dropped one at my feet or Sue’s. I had to pick them up quickly. There was a fifty-fifty chance that the poor crittur was still alive. I released many outside; after that they were on their own.
Two were distinctive. One day I was taking my daily postprandial nap in the bed. Unbeknownst to me Woodrow brought into the bedroom his latest prey, a small bird. He silently entered, crawled under the bed with his catch in his mouth, positioned himself directly below my head, and commenced to crunch the bones between his jaws. It was a very disconcerting addition to my dreamscape. Needless to say he left the remains beneath the bed for me to clean up.
A dove only weighs about 4 oz. Woodrow could carry one easily.
On another day I came home for lunch to find that Woodrow had apparently brought home a guest, a full-grown mourning dove. Evidently Woodrow had lost his appetite, but the bird may have thought that he was on still on the menu. He flew about, crashing into one window after another in a panicked attempt to escape. I finally chased him into the library, where I opened the window and closed the door. When I came home after work there was no sign of him. We have never found a cadaver, and so I presume the dove found his way out.
Imagine him with 20 sharp claws.
Woodrow was the only pet that we ever had who clearly had multiple personality disorder. His was more like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde than The Three Faces of Eve.
I called Woodrow’s alter-ego Nutso Kitty. Whenever he entered this state his eyes glazed over, and he stalked and attacked anything that moved. One day Woodrow was placidly napping with me when, unbeknownst to me, he underwent the demonic transformation. I must have moved my hand a little. He pounced on it with all twenty of his switchblades extended. After literally throwing him out of the room, I rushed to the bathroom for first aid. My hand throbbed in pain for a few days. Fortunately it was my left hand, which has never been much good for anything except typing.
This even looks like Woodrow.
In 1992 or 1993 Sue and I made a trip to Dallas to pitch TSI’s AdDept software system to Neiman Marcus (described here). We then drove our rental car to Austin so that Sue could visit her high school friend Marlene Soul. Marlene exhibited a toy she used to keep her cats active. It was a long very limp stick with a feather on the end. With every slightest move of the hand the cat was drawn inexorably to the dancing feather.
As soon as I got home I purchased one so that I could torture Woodrow. He absolutely could not resist it. After he chased it for at least an hour he hid under a chair so that he could not see it. I pulled it out every time that I thought about that bloody left hand.
We had to take Woodrow to the vet twice to patch him up after fights. Both times he had abscesses that the vet had to drain and then sew up. After the first one, I tried to teach Woody to keep his left up, but he got tagged again a few months later. I never got to see how the other cat did in these scrapes, but I doubt that he escaped without some damage.
I don’t really have many good stories about Rocky. He was consistently a very sweet cat for all of the eighteen years that I knew him. He never got into a fight, or at least he never got seriously hurt. When we brought him to the vet for shots he went completely limp when we put him on the examination table. The vet called him “catatonic cat.”
Once, however, Rocky was missing for three days. Sue and were quite concerned. I had walked up and down the nearby streets looking for him several times. I also took the car and expanded the search area. Sue and I searched everywhere in the house. No luck. However, when I checked the garage for the third time Rocky came slowly out from behind some junk. He followed me inside and nonchalantly drank some water. Within a day he showed no sign of any problem.
How, you may ask, could the cat have hidden in the garage? Why not just pull out the car and search thoroughly? Well, there was no car in the garage. It was full of Sue’s junk, packed from floor to ceiling, as is her new garage as I write this. A thorough search of the garage would have entailed taking all of the junk out piece by piece and piling it somewhere on the yard. Then, whether I found him or not, I would have had to reassemble the mess in precisely the way that I found it.
I did call for Rocky each time that I opened the garage door, but he must have been asleep or just obstinate.
Show no mercy!
Both Rocky and Woodrow stayed outside a great deal during the summer. They both were tormented by fleas every year. I felt great sympathy for them. They were obviously suffering terribly. I tried to help them.
I tried to pick the fleas off. During each session, I slew several dozen by squeezing them between my fingernails. I could hear their shells crack, but a few days later there would be just as many.
I tried flea collars. Rocky, who must certainly have had a set of bolt-cutters secreted away in the bushes, always showed up without it within a few hours. The collar helped a little with Woodrow, but there was no guarantee that the fleas would cross it. He also hated the collar, but Rocky would not lend out his tools.
I tried flea powder. It helped a little for a short time.
Flea baths actually worked, but both cats hated them. After a short struggle Rocky submitted meekly, but he also gave me a look that asked what he had done to make me despise him so much. Woodrow, of course, fought me tooth and nail. I had to don gloves and my army field jacket to pick him up. One time—I swear that this is true—he clearly screamed out the word “NO!!!!” as I dipped him in the medicated water in the tub.
Advantage was even better than Frontline.
Of course, if we did not attack them quickly, the fleas got in the carpet, and, after we got them off of the cats we had to “bomb” the house. That was not a bit pleasant.
Fortunately, the flea problem was solved when our vet supplied us with Frontline2, the monthly drops on the back of the neck, at some point in the nineties. I don’t know if there were side effects, but the product sure worked on the fleas. It was great having flea-free cats and a flea-free house.
Not long after Woodrow established residency with us, I bought a cat door and installed it in a window that led to the top of the basement. It was located just below the bathroom window. Just below the window on the basement side was the top of some shelves that were there when we moved in. From the shelves I placed a spare door at a 45° angle to serve as a ramp down to the ping pong table. A box served as a step up to the table or down to the floor.
Rocky seldom used the cat door. He preferred for a human to let him out through one of the doors or in through his favorite window. When he did enter through the cat door, he did not use the ramp. Instead he jumped from the bookshelves to the washing machine and from there to the floor. He exited the house by jumping up on the picnic table and climbing the shelves.
Other cats occasionally tried to use the cat door. Brian Corcoran gave me his Super Soaker, which proved to be very effective at chasing them away. However, the felines were most active at night, and I was not. Occasionally one would get in and help himself to some Purina Cat Chow.
I often heard the distinctive caterwauling of two or more cats that were about to engage in that furious and bloody activity known as a catfight. Once I saw Woodrow in the basement on the bookshelf near the cat door loudly warning a cat not to poke his head through. He definitely meant business. His body was crouched and taut, ready to for action. His right paw was raised with all five claws drawn. He reminded me of Horatius at the bridge.
Ours was indoors, and I only saw him from the rear before he scurried away.
There were a couple of other uninvited guests. One night I heard some very loud munching coming from the hallway. I jumped out of bed, turned on the hall light, and beheld an opossum helping himself to the Cat Chow in a bowl at the other end of the hall. I assume that the opossum was a male since it did not have a dozen babies on its back.He had evidently found his way through the cat door, down to the basement, and up the stairs. My footsteps frightened him enough that he rushed down the stairs, never to be seen again.
The story of the other remarkable intruder can be read here.
Sue and I took quite a few long trips after Rocky and Woodrow moved in, and the cat door was installed. We also invested a few dollars in a gravity-fed Cat Chow dispenser. Whenever we took a trip we left Rocky and Woodrow “home alone”. We provided them with plenty of food and water, and Sue arranged for someone to check on them every few days. This arrangement worked well for our trip to Texas (described here), our cruising tour of Greece and Turkey (described here), our trip to Hawaii in 1997 (described here), our misbegotten adventure in Maine and Canada (described here), and our first tour of Italy in 2003 (described here).
Rocky died later in 2003 at the age of eighteen. I am pretty sure that he used up all nine of his allotted lives. Even though I was much closer to Woodrow for the many years that we had both of them, I cried when Rocky died. He was so tough and such a nice cat. I really missed him.
1. A better choice probably would have been “Augustus”. His personality was much more like the free-spirited Gus McCrae’s than the rigid Woodrow Call’s.
2. I later switched to Advantage II. It was cheaper and worked better.
TSI’s first, last, and best programmer was Denise Bessette. The beginnings of her career at TSI are documented here. At some point in the second half of the eighties she decided to finish her undergraduate degree in economics and mathematics at Smith College in Northampton, MA, and then get a masters degree in econ at Trinity College in Hartford. She lived in Stafford, which is forty-two miles from Smith and thirty-two miles from Trinity. She commuted to both schools. During this lengthy period Denise continued to work part-time at TSI. She also raised her son Chris. Frankly, I don’t know how she did it. She never seemed burnt out or exhausted.
After she graduated she returned to work full time. At that time I named her vice-president of application development. I also arranged that Denise could share a portion of Sue’s office. At the time I did not think that there was much more that I could do. The layout of our office in Enfield (described here) provided for only two offices. Sue had the corner office. The other one was used by our salesmen. I worked in the computer room.
This arrangement seemed to work fairly well for a while. In 1994, because of TSI’s “second crisis” (described here), Denise was able to establish herself in that office. A few years later Denise decided that she needed to try to work at a company in which she had more control over her situation. This prompted TSI’s “third crisis”, which is described here.
After that situation was very pleasantly resolved, Denise and I worked productively as partners until the company was dissolved in 2014. She was in charge of getting the programming and support done and hiring the technical staff. She also continued to handle the payroll. The administrative and sales people reported to me. I continued to do the sales calls, demos, installations, and training. I also spent countless hours researching alternative approaches to our way of doing business.
After TSI moved its office to East Windsor and installed a network with a connections to the Internet, Denise handled all phases of it and worked with our clients to establish and maintain access to their computer systems. I was more than happy to let her deal with those issues.
She also managed the people who cleaned the office and a few other similar functions.
Memories: Denise caught on to my style of programming faster than any other coder that we hired. I was somewhat upset when she went part-time to be able to finish college. The silver lining was that it was unlikely that she would quit before she got her degree, or as it turned out, degrees.
In the eighties Denise sometimes brought her son Christopher into the office. She stashed him in the supply closet. No, she did not shut the door. He seemed to be content with whatever she gave him to play with there.
I remember that on one occasion Denise invited Sue and me to supper at the house in Stafford where she lived with her husband Ray for supper. It was a very nice house with a deck. The heating was provided by one or two stoves that burned wood chips. I had never seen such a thing.
That was the only time that we visited them. If you are wondering whether we reciprocated the invitation, the answer is no. I am not sure why, but we almost never invited anyone over to any of our residences in Connecticut. We probably were still living in Rockville.
I played golf with Ray and his dad a few times. They liked to play at Grassmere, a short public course in Enfield with only nine holes. I seem to remember that one hole had a huge tree right in front of the green. If you did not hit your drive far enough, your only shot to the green was to try to hit a wedge or nine-iron over the tree.
When we hired Denise she was a smoker. In the late eighties she quit cold turkey at about the same time that Sue, Patti Corcoran, and my dad also quit. I don’t remember her getting irritable or fat during the drying out period.
On one occasion her kitchen sink got backed up because Denise poured instant mashed potatoes down it. I bought her a box of instant mashed potatoes as a memento. Later I kicked a dent in one of our cabinets when I got upset at a client. She bought me an inflatable Fred Flintstone to punch when I got angry. It is still in the basement in 2023, but I haven’t tried to inflate it in a few decades.
Denise knew that I read quite a bit. She was taken aback when I casually remarked that I did not enjoy reading female authors, especially ones in the science fiction or fantasy genres.1 On her recommendations I read several Anne Tyler books. They were all fairly good, but I had to admit that Breathing Lessons was close to a masterpiece.
I was always envious of Denise’s cars—a sporty Mazda when she started working for us and a string of BMW’s thereafter. When in 2007 I bought my sapphire blue Honda Accord coupe, she said, “That sure doesn’t look like my grandmother’s Honda!”
She was almost never ill in the thirty years that I worked with her. Then again, neither was I. I remember that she got an infection from inner-tubing on the Farmington River on one of TSI’s summer outings. We never tried that again.
Denise and I enjoyed a very productive trip together when we attended the IBM PartnerWorld convention in San Diego in 2000. The details are described here.
Denise drank mostly tea and Diet Coke in cans.2 She ordinarily just dipped the teabags in the hot water once or twice. I’ve never seen such a weak beverage. Her favorite was Earl Grey. I purloined for her envelopes of tea from the hotels at which I stayed. She seldom took a lunch break; she just grazed on what she brought with her.
At some point in the nineties Sue Comparetto, Denise, and I attended a performance of Carmen at the Bushnell Theater in Hartford. We all enjoyed the opera well enough, but I was disappointed that, as usual, Sue was late and so we missed the talk that was presented before the show.
Several years later Denise and I spent an hour or two at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. She wanted to show me some impressionist paintings. They did nothing for me. I am a Philistine when it comes to art.
Denise was afraid of escalators. She avoided them if possible. If not, she was very tentative. She did not like the moving sidewalks at airports, either.
When Christopher was in high school Denise told me that his best friend was a girl in his class. She alleged that they were just friends. Although this sounded preposterous to me, I kept my mouth shut.
Competition.
I remember when Christopher graduated from high school and was in the process of selecting a college. Denise wanted him to go to a good school in New England. He wanted to go to Penn State. I advised her to tell him that he would have a better chance with the girls at a local school. At PSU half of the male students were linebackers on the football team. I doubt that she took my sagacious advice. He became a Nittany Lion.
She especially did not like it when Christopher joined a fraternity in State College, but he somehow survived the experience, and Denise is now a grandma.
Their cottage was much smaller and a few blocks from the Sound.
Denise loved bodies of water—oceans, lakes, ponds, rivers, anything. She was always happier when she was close enough to experience a body of water through any sense. For years she and her husband Ray had a cottage in Old Saybrook near the Long Island Sound. Several times they took vacations in Aruba.
In 2013 Denise and Ray sold both their house in Stafford and the cottage and moved to Cape Cod. I saw her only a few times in the last year that we worked together and never since.
Business Relationship: For the most part Denise and I had a very productive relationship. Largely it was a case of staying out of each other’s way and (after I made her a partner in 1997) coming together in November and December to evaluate progress and distribute bonuses.
A blog entry about the agendas for the periodic meetings that the two of us enjoyed from 2001 through 2006 has been posted here.
Denise provided some needed organization and discipline to TSI’s approach to programming. My “cowboy coder” philosophy dictated that when I was at a client’s site, and someone complained about a problem, I would immediately investigate it. I often was able to fix it on the spot within a few minutes. This often made me a hero at the client’s office, but a pain back at TSI. It was not easy to isolate all of the things that I had changed, bring them back to the office in an orderly manner, and integrate them into the master copy of the system without disrupting processes used by other clients. Keep in mind that I installed thirty-six AdDept systems, and they were all running the same code.
I eventually had to refrain from addressing any problems at a client’s site. I documented them but did not change the code. … All right, I’ll fess up. Sometimes I could not keep myself from making changes that I was 100 percent certain would not interfere with what was being done at the office. Denise was not a bit happy when I did this. Perhaps we were fortunate that eventually our clients lost the willingness to pay for me to travel to visit them.
The only other point of contention between Denise and me involved research. Both of us knew that the platform on which we had built AdDept–BASIC programs on the AS/400–was considered obsolete by many people in the world of data processing. In most cases these people had veto power over a purchase of our system. It was generally a waste of time to try to persuade them that their evaluation was erroneous. They were hired as experts. We were just potential vendors.
Denise and I agreed that the ideal solution would be to move the whole system to the Internet to avoid the standards that were being established by IT departments. This approach is now called Cloud Computing. However, we were never satisfied that we could do it without man-years of work and considerable expense.
If there was no pathway to the cloud-based approach, the issue was whether the problem was BASIC or the AS/400. I thought that we should investigate the programming languages that coders were using on platforms outside of IBM. At that time the most popular languages were C and C++. C was somewhat similar in structure to BASIC. C++ was its object-oriented version. I spent some time researching the IBM version of C and concluded that a transition to C was possible but unquestionably difficult.
For reasons that I never understood Denise was quite upset at me for spending any time investigating this possibility. I had absolutely no intention of asking her to convert the programs. I was just trying to see whether it was a possibility.
The other side of this coin was Denise’s advocacy of converting all of our BASIC programs to a version of RPG, a language that was popular on the AS/400 but nowhere else, dubbed ILE.3 I never understood the reason for this, but it kept the programmers busy after the requests for programming began to dry up. So, for the most part I kept my opinions to myself.
After Denise moved to the Cape she only came into the office a few times a month. She was in rather constant communication by telephone with Jason Dean, who, at that point, was our only programmer. I liked it a lot better when Denise was in the office all of the time, but my philosophy had always been to take advantage of whatever time she could give me.
1. I need to explain this. I have no doubt that women can write as well as men by virtually any measure. In 2023 (as this is being written) they definitely dominate the publishing industry. However, I contend that women have a basic fantasy about being rescued, and men have one about being heroic. I contend that this is not cultural but innate. Nature, not nurture.
I find that reading about the latter fantasies more interesting than the former. Is that a crime? I have never like a science fiction or fantasy book by a female author. Several times I got suspicious in the middle of one in which the author used initials or a pseudonym and looked up the author used initials or a pseudonym. After looking the author up and discovering the secret I stopped reading. Before you ask, I have never read a single word of the Harry Potter books.
2. I always thought that cola from plastic bottles tasted a little better. For some reason the two liter bottles are always cheaper and usually on sale somewhere. I like both Diet Pepsi and Diet Coke equally. I always have bought whichever one was cheaper. After the business closed I switched to the caffeine-free versions.
3A 220-page document from IBM that aims to show why ILE is a superior approach can be viewed here.
