The most mysterious of all of the trips that my wife Sue and I took together was the only one for which she did all of the planning. My recollections of this bizarre experience have mostly been repressed. In 2023 … Continue reading →
The most mysterious of all of the trips that my wife Sue and I took together was the only one for which she did all of the planning. My recollections of this bizarre experience have mostly been repressed. In 2023 I could remember the basic route that we took and a few of the experiences. I did not recall most of the names of places we visited or companies with which we interacted.
I do not even remember when this event occurred. I have assigned the date 2000, but it could be off, even by a year or more. If it was in 2000 we must have gone in the fall or late summer. Denise Bessette and I went to San Diego (described here) in January. This trip could not have been scheduled for the subsequent months in which I was very busy with work.
I hypothesized in 2023 that we planned to start on a Friday morning, stay for two nights in Nova Scotia and return on Sunday. Sue agreed with this, but we may very well be wrong.
Sue somehow won two free round-trip tickets on a regional airline that was based in Boston. My dim recollection is that it was called Executive Airlines1 or something like that. We could fly to any destination that the company served. We had a certificate but no tickets; we had to fly stand-by. So, in effect, the airline gave away seats that would have been empty.
Sue wanted to fly to Halifax, Nova Scotia. I suspect that this desire stemmed from tales told by her grandmother, Molly Locke, whom Sue idolized, of her adventures in the maritime provinces.
We drove from Enfield to the Boston area. I have a feeling that we parked in Framingham and took the T to the airport. I am pretty sure that we did this once, and if it wasn’t for this adventure, I cannot imagine when it would have been.
When we arrived at the airport we made our way to a room devoted to this airline. It wasn’t a ticket counter. I remember that we sat in plastic seats in a room and plotted our strategy. There were other people in the same situation, but it was not crowded. Sue had planned on flying to Halifax, Nova Scotia, but the flights on that day had no seats available. I remember being very upset by this development. If I had any inkling that it was a possibility, I would never have agreed to it. As I sat there helpless, I became more and more incensed. Sue tried to calm me down by telling me to relax because “we are on vacation.” I retorted that this was no vacation.
The time estimate from Google maps must reflect the fact that in 2023 there are no direct flights.
In the end Sue suggested that we fly to Presque Isle, ME—a destination that was apparently not in much demand that day. There we would rent a car, and drive to Nova Scotia. After we had spent a day painting the province red, we would drive back to Presque Isle and fly back to Boston. I considered it a close call between her suggestion and writing off the entire idea and thereby returning home to Enfield sadder but wiser.
Of course, I eventually capitulated, and we exchanged our certificate for tickets to Maine’s third-largest airport, which is located only a few miles from the Canadian border. The plane, as I remember it, was rather nice. I should actually say that I don’t remember anything good or bad about it. I think that it may have even been a jet. It had perhaps two dozen seats that were rather comfortable. The flight was short. I don’t think that anyone served as much as a beverage.
This is an “international” airport, not a bus station.
We landed at Presque Isle’s airport. It was by far the least impressive one that I had ever seen. I remember that the baggage claim was a chute that was less than ten feet wide and not even that long. We could see the workers take the few bags off the plane and plop them on the chute. The good thing was that there was very little danger of losing or misplacing a bag.
There was one car rental establishment. I don’t remember which company it was, but it may have been Avis, which had an office there in 2023. I remember that we had an option to rent a Volkswagen New Beetle, which had been introduced in 1998. I am pretty sure that we declined and settled on some kind of compact car.
I already knew that there was quite a bit of land between Maine and Nova Scotia. We discovered on the map that came with the rental car that it was mostly New Brunswick. We spent most of the rest of the day driving across one of Canada’s least famous provinces. I remember almost nothing but frustration about this experience. I do not remember if I drove, Sue drove, or we split it up. I have a feeling that I did the bulk of the driving because in those days some rental companies charged extra for a second driver. We must have stopped for lunch and/or supper somewhere, but I do not have any recollection of that. Likewise, I do not remember any of the cities or towns, although a few of the names seem familiar. The city of Saint John rings a bell, but it would have been out of our way to stop there.
We stayed overnight somewhere north of Halifax. It was a fairly rustic place with a view of the water. I remember something about Prince Edward Island, but from the map it does not seem as if we could ever have been in sight of it. Sue recalled us eating bay scallops from Prince Edward Island. I might have tried one, but people from Kansas—especially ones that grew up as Catholics—generally avoid marine insects. She thought that the water that I remembered was a tidal pool.
We visited Halifax on the second day. We spent some time at a fort or something similar with a view of the sea. The one vivid memory of the whole trip that I have retained is that we visited a room that had hundreds of butterflies. It may have been in the Museum of Natural History that listed a “butterfly house” among its attractions in 2023. This was the only time on the entire trip that I felt entertained or relaxed. Sue’s recollection of Halifax in 2023 was entirely different. She recalled only touring a garden.
That’s all that I remember. We drove back to Presque Isle. We flew to Boston. We took the T to Framingham. We drove from there to Enfield.
This was by far the worst mini-vacation that I ever took.
1. I could not locate much information about this or any similar airline on the Internet. I am almost positive that it went out of business within a month or two of our epic trip. One website mentioned such a company in New England. The post is here. However, in the seventies that airline was sold to Air New England, which went out of business in 1981. So, I am probably wrong about the name.
I had high hopes of watching some camel wrestling on this trip.
I do not remember how I discovered this cruise from Istanbul to Athens with stops in Lesbos, Kuşadası (Ephesus), Rhodes, and Santorini. The price was so low that I just could not pass it up. My recollection is that it was only $1,000 per person double occupancy, but maybe it was $1,500. It also included three nights at a very nice hotel in Istanbul and two nights in Athens.
How hard could modern Greek be?
Sometimes cruise lines had empty cabins that they would sell at the last minute for a deep discount to people who could travel with little notice. This could not have been one of those situations. I had time to check out a travel guidebook for Turkey from the library. In it I learned about camel wrestling, which I hoped to see in Turkey. I also had enough time to purchase Barron’s Mastering Greek at the local Barnes & Noble. It was a package of books and cassette tapes developed by the U.S. Foreign Service Institute. I entertained the fantasy that because of the ten semesters of classical Greek classes that I had taken in high school and college, I would be able to master modern Greek in a few weeks. I discovered that the grammar had not changed much, but the vocabulary was totally different. Phrases such as “early-born”, “rosy-fingered”, and “cloudgatherer” were not used much in the twentieth century. The worst discovery was that the pronunciation, especially the vowel sounds, was very different from what I was taught.
Sue agreed that we should sign up for the cruise. Our goal was simply to mix a lot of relaxation with a bit of the exotic. Did we check out the cruise line? Of course not. Why would we?
I cannot remember the name of the cruise line or the ship. I am pretty sure that the word “dolphin” was part of one or both of the names.1 I remember that when I checked a few years later the cruise line was out of business.
I also am uncertain of both the year and the month in which we traveled. My best guess is that it was 1992, but I may be wrong. My recollection is that the weather was pretty nice throughout the trip. Sue would have been very uncomfortable if we traveled in the summer. On the other hand, Denise Bessette was working fewer hours at TSI during the spring and fall because of her classes. I would feel much more comfortable knowing that she was in TSI’s office when we were abroad.
This was the plan.
The plan was to fly from Newark to Frankfort on Lufthansa and then change to another Lufthansa flight to Istanbul. Our return flight was non-stop from Athens to JFK in Queens. I made sure that I obtained a frequent flyer number from Delta and for whichever airline Lufthansa was associated with. I think that it was United.
I was a little scared of us being on our own in Turkey. I don’t remember that I ever saw Midnight Express, but I had heard about it. I also learned from the guide book that over 99 percent of the inhabitants of Turkey were Muslim. This did not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. Sue and I were not experienced international travelers. We had both been to England in 1990, and Sue had been to Amsterdam in the seventies, but neither of us had ever changed planes in a foreign country, and the whole idea of arriving in Istanbul, while thrilling, also provoked a little angst. It was not the third world, but it wasn’t London or Amsterdam either.
We used Erika Travel, our usual agent, to book the flight to Newark. At the time Continental offered a shuttle service from Bradley to Newark. Our plane left Bradley and arrived in Newark on time. We then took the tram to the international terminal. When we reached the front of the line at the Lufthansa ticket counter, it was a little more than an hour before the departure time. The agent told us, however, that it was too late to check in. Our seats had already been assigned to standby passengers. She was, however, able to book us on a British Airways flight to Heathrow with a connection to Istanbul. It would arrive less than an hour after the Lufthansa flight from Frankfort.2
British Airways to the rescue.
There was still one major difficulty. Our luggage was in the Lufthansa section of the secure area. We had to wait for it to arrive at the British Airways ticketing area. The first step was for the bags to be located and placed on a cart. The cart then somehow needed to exit the secure area to a place where trucks were allowed. The truck then needed to circle around from the departure area to the arrival area to drop the bags off to us. It seemed very unlikely to me that all of this would work, but it did. We had just enough time to check our bags and board the British Airways flight.
This was a tremendous relief for me. I do not get stressed out over many things in life, but the idea of having to make connections “on the fly” from Newark, NJ, to Istanbul, Turkey, is the kind of scenario that usually only appears in my nightmares.
I don’t remember anything about the flight to London. We arrived early in the morning. We had no trouble finding our connection to Istanbul, and that flight arrived right on time. As soon as we got off of the plane, however, we knew that we were in a different sort of place. It seemed more like a second- or third-rate airport in the U.S. than a major international hub, and it felt old and unprofessional The most striking thing to me was a man wearing a suit seated at a card table. On the wall behind him was a cardboard sign: “Joker Rent-a-Car”.
Istanbul Atatürk Airport.
All of our luggage arrived, and we had no difficulty with customs. Now came the part that worried me. We exited the baggage claim area into the main terminal. Hundreds of people were amassed behind a cordon. Many were screaming at passengers whom they recognized or thought that they recognized. We endured a minute or two of panic in this chaotic scene, but then we spotted a young man hold a sign emblazoned with the name of our cruise line. We headed his way and introduced ourselves. His list of passengers was sorted by airline and flight number. Since our scheduled flight had arrive earlier, it took him a while to locate our names.
A different person, who had been standing next to him, walked with us for perhaps fifty yards. At that point we were handed off to another person. In all, five or six different escorts accompanied us for short stretches to the bus. The last of these explained that jobs were plentiful in Turkey, but the pay was not very good.
The bus took Sue, me, and perhaps twenty other passengers to our hotel, which was modern and western. I seem to remember that it was a Conrad Hotel, but I may be wrong. We went up to our room and unpacked. Nothing was scheduled for this first day. I went out for a little walk, but the hotel was pretty much isolated from the rest of the city. Immediately upon my return to the room I collapsed on the bed and slept for several hours. I was exhausted from the stress and jet lag. It was the first time that I had experienced jet lag, and this was the worst cast that I can remember.
Sue and I may have eaten supper at the hotel. At the time the exchange rate was approximately 7,000 lira per dollar. So, the prices on the menu were rather startling. The locals, however, were generally more than happy to take dollars from tourists.
The vacation started in earnest the next day. It was never clear who employed the people arranging our tours of Istanbul. The cruise line probably contracted with one or more local touring companies. In general, the approach was to spend a small amount of time at a large number of places.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Buses took us to various tourist spots accompanied by a guide. Ours was a young woman who spoke perfect English and, unlike nearly all of the local woman whom we saw, wore no head scarf. She informed us about the Janissaries, Christian troops who protected the Sultan and guarded the harem (accent on the second syllable). She also told us about Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the Turkish national hero who defeated the Allies in World War I at Gallipoli and the combined Greek and allied forces in the Turkish Civil War that ended in 1923. She called that later event “the miracle”. I also remember her telling us how proud she was that her country, while predominantly Muslim, had a secular democratic government with the objective of being open to Europe and the west.3 The military, of all things traditionally intervened in favor of democracy and secularism whenever the government tilted toward religious fundamentalism.
We also learned from her that the Turks tended to take vacations as extended families. Many who worked in the European part owned second houses on the Asian coast that were used as vacation dwellings by relatives. We saw some of these houses. I remember being surprised at how many of them had solar panels.
One thing that our guide did not attempt was to teach us a few words of Turkish—not hello, good-bye, please, thank you: nothing. Although a small portion of the residents of Istanbul spoke English, it was a good bet that nearly all of those people were the ones that we would encounter in our short stay.
I don’t remember the order in which we visited the sights. It surprises me that we were able to cram so many into only two days. We did not stay more than a couple of hours at any of them, and I don’t remember needing to wait in line anywhere.
We definitely visited the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, which is better known as the Blue Mosque. It was gigantic. The inside was decorated with tiles and windows and figures, but mostly it was just empty. I knew that because they were considered idolatry, there would be no statues or painting inside, but it still seemed awfully vacant. This approach has worked to inspire people for thirteen centuries; it is definitely not my place to criticize it. I am just saying that it seemed to work much better as a mosque than as a tourist attraction.
The outside of the Blue Mosque, however, was definitely impressive. In fact, the whole array of domes and minarets throughout the city was striking. The calls to prayer were likewise a reminder that we were intruders in an ancient culture. We enjoyed the experience. One of the primary purposes of this cruise was to broaden our horizons.
The luxurious Topkapi Palace was the Ottoman Sultan’s home before 1856. It was then turned into a government office building and subsequently a museum. Our tour did not include the harem (accent on second syllable), but we were told that we could arrange to come back and see it on our own if we wanted to do so.
I do not remember much about the experience. After we entered the building we were on our own without a guide. I have a vague recollection of some armor and weapons, some documents , and some jewelry. Nothing really caught my attention. At that point in my life I was only vaguely familiar with the historical context.
I was hoping that we would get to visit Hagia Sophia, the famous cathedral that was the centerpiece of the Eastern Church for centuries. After the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 it was turned into a mosque. The day that we were scheduled to go there it was closed for some reason.
Instead the bus let us off at a former Christian church that featured a collection of Byzantine mosaics. I think that it might have been the Chora Church. As I recall, we were all rather tightly jammed into the space at the entrance. The mosaics were on all sides of us, including above us. My neck bothered me for several days after this. At the time I was too much of a philistine to appreciate the artistry, but at least it was more interesting than looking at hundreds of identical tiles. No one knowledgeable was with us to explain the works.
The bus also dropped us off at the Grand Bazaar, an incredibly large covered marketplace. Inside were several thousand stores. Although they were all inside, and there were only a few points of entry,there were lots of actual streets. The stores sold all kinds of stuff, but most catered to tourists. My recollection is that about half of them sold rugs. There might have been price tags on some items, but, in fact, all prices were negotiable.
My recollection is of a place with much less light and much more people.
Sue enjoyed examining the knickknacks at some of the stores. She may have bought something; I don’t remember. I did not go in very far; I tried to keep an exit in sight at all times. It would be extremely easy to get lost there. That would be my idea of hell, being lost in the Grand Bazaar being passed from one rug salesman to another until they finally broke down my resistance. Then a different set of vendors could swoop like hyenas after a kill.
Many of the salesmen in the bazaar sat outside of their stores and aggressively tried to encourage people to stop in their stores. They could identify foreigners from their shoes. Most of our group were obviously Americans.
We visited a location outside of the city walls. I think that it was the Rumelihisan Fortress. I do not remember much about it. Sue stayed down at the ground level and took photos4 while I climbed around and took in the incredible view across the Bosphorus.
We attended a concert of Turkish military music; come to think of it, it might have been inside the fortress. The musicians were in the army, and they all had big mustaches. We were told that this was a tradition among the Turks. For some reason the mustaches were said to terrify their opponents. I guess that they worked sort of like the maize and blue winged helmets.
I don’t remember much about the music itself. It sounded nothing like anything with which I was familiar. I get annoyed by bad music rather easily; this performance did not bother me.
On one of the evenings the cruise line had arranged a private party for our group at a different hotel. Buses took us there, and we all took the elevator up to a room on one of the top floors. There were snacks and drinks and music. The big attraction was some authentic Turkish belly dancing by one of the very few blonde women whom we encountered anywhere in Turkey. We later were informed that she had learned her technique at a belly dancing school in New Jersey. It was a goof, but we had a pleasant time.
A group of us also went to what was apparently a high-end carpet store that was, as I recall, air conditioned. My recollection is that we sat in something that resembled bleachers The salesman was very polished. He provided us all with a beverage. I think that it was the extremely strong Turkish coffee. There may have been something else. Then helper after helper brought out rug after rug that each unrolled with one practiced snap. The salesman then explained the weaving techniques employed the people who had woven the rugs and what the advantages of each method was. The presentation was very professional.
At the end he described the process the store used to send the rugs to the homes of the purchasers regardless of where they lived. Most of the attendees succumbed to the lure of the performance, but Sue and I had no interest in buying a rug. As I recall, the seats and the cool air were the selling points for our attendance.
All the men in Istanbul seemed to smoke cigarettes. My guidebook said that most were chain smokers. They might extinguish their cigarettes while they were pumping gas, but that was about it. We saw advertisements everywhere for Lucky Strike and Camel cigarettes. We were told that many Turks preferred American cigarettes They were considered healthier because the taste was not as strong.
I proudly called to mind the old American commercials that showed actors dressed as doctors endorsing various brands of cigarettes. No product was as profitable as an addictive drug. Tobacco was the best one because it took decades to kill their customers.
We saw countless taxi drivers in the European part of Istanbul. All of them were men, and they all seemed to have mustaches. They held their cigarettes between two fingers on the right hand as it perched perched on the steering wheel.
We were encouraged to venture out into the city on our own. The guide told us that there was very little crime in the city. The method of transportation preferred by the locals was in little vans that were available at designated locations. There did not seem to be a schedule. The van depart only when it was full. I don’t know how one transferred from one van to another. We never tried this.
On one of the mornings Sue and I got adventurous and walked to a little market near the hotel. We bought a loaf or two of bread and some jam or something. The whole thing cost less than a dollar, and we made a nice little breakfast out of it.
The cruise line arranged for all of us to cross the Bosphorus to the Asian side on a ferry. We stayed there only long enough to enjoy a wonderful home-cooked lunch at a restaurant there. I don’t remember exactly what was served. I think that they offered eight or ten dishes, and we were allowed to sample the ones that interested us. It was the first time that Sue and I had ever been in Asia.
On one other occasion our group ate at a restaurant that catered to business people. They were all seated near a large window far from the entrance. The proprietor seated as far away from them as possible because the air in their section was thick with cigarette smoke. As I recall, the food was quite good, but pricey by Turkish standards.
Our most memorable time in Istanbul was the last evening. I decided that we should go out and try a local restaurant on our own that I had noticed near the hotel. It had decals for Visa and MasterCard affixed to the door.
Sue and I walked there, went in, and asked in English supplemented by gestures for a table in the non-smoking section. Someone escorted us upstairs to an area with eight or ten tables. We immediately noticed the white tablecloths that were decorated with small holes—cigarette burns. I seem to remember that the waiter also brought a fan over to blow on us. It must have been warm up there.
Our enduring memory of Istanbul.
We both ordered fish and some side dishes that I don’t remember. The fish came with head and bones. After we had consumed what we could we each took a photo of the other as we held the fish skeleton beside our heads.
When the bill was presented, I gave my credit card to the waiter. He took it and was gone for a few minutes. He returned with the card and stammered for a few seconds before saying, “No sleeps. No sleeps.”
He meant that the restaurant had supposedly exhausted its supply of credit card slips. I suspect that the Visa and MasterCard stickers had not been valid for some time.
So, I paid with dollars. He brought back our change in liras. I explained that we were leaving the next morning, and could not use liras. He took back the liras. He was gone for five or ten minutes before he returned with the change in dollars. I suspect that he had to get it from a friend or relative.
Sue and I enjoyed this experience. There was something joyful about interacting successfully with someone from a totally different culture. They did things differently in Turkey, but in our experience they generally got them done.
The cruise itself, the days on the Greek mainland, and the return trip are described in Part 2, which can be read here.
The Dolphin IV after it was sold to Canaveral Cruise Line.
1. Dolphin Cruise Line, which was sold to Premier Cruise Line in 1997, owned and operated a ship called the Dolphin IV. It was definitely sailing in the early nineties, but I was unable to verify that it sailed the Aegean.
2. This turned out to be a real bonanza. We were not charged anything for transferring our reservations to British Airways. In fact, Lufthansa took down our address and sent us a check for several hundred dollars to cover the inconvenience. Flying was a lot different in those days.
3. I remember thinking about our young guide in 2014 when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party was elected and began moving the country away from this secular and democratic approach. In 2021 secular Turkey is only a dim memory.
4. I have not been able to locate any of Sue’s photos of this trip. The only photos that I took were with Sue’s camera.
The story of the pets who shared the house in Enfield with Sue and me begins here. It recounts the first fifteen years of our lives there with, for most of the period, two cats named Rocky and Woodrow. Rocky died in the summer of 2003 after a very full life.
In late 2003 or early 2004 Sue’s sister Betty told us that a friend of hers had a family of cats that were too much for her to manage. Sue went to meet her one evening and chose on the spot to adopt a long-haired black male that was about the same size as Rocky and Woodrow. The woman called him Fluffy, which, of course, would never do. I dubbed him Giacomo after my favorite opera composer, Giacomo Puccini, and Giacomo della Chiesa, better known as Pope Benedict XV.
For a few weeks Giacomo was, to put it mildly, very wary of his new surroundings. We did not keep him cooped up for more than a day or two, and thereafter I personally spent a lot of time looking for him and trying to remove him from various hiding places. I remember that one day he somehow crawled under the dishwasher in the old kitchen. Fortunately, he was just shy, not a bit aggressive or even defensive. As soon as I got a good grip on him he let me pull him out of his hiding spot without much of a struggle.
Giacomo on the chair showing off his thumbs and his anteater tail. Woodrow looks up from the floor.
Finding him when he hid outdoors was even more challenging. He liked to retreat beneath some evergreen bushes on the north side of our house. When I approached him from one side, he slipped over to the other. It took me at least thirty minutes to retrieve him whenever he did this.
Woodrow, who made new friends very easily, took the new kid under his wing. Giacomo followed his lead in nearly everything.
Eventually, Giacomo became comfortable in both our house and our yard. However, he did not seem to comprehend the value of the cat door (described here). It looked like a trap to him.
Finally, one day Sue and I decided to team up to help him understand it. Sue held him on the outside of the cat door and pushed him through. I was in the basement standing on a chair by the cat door. When he appeared on the top shelf of the bookcase, I grabbed him, took him in my arms (which he liked), and walked around the basement enough so that he could figure out where he was. I then returned him to the top shelf by the cat door and pushed him back through it. Sue grabbed him and held him for a minute or two. Then she pushed him back through to the basement again.
All of a sudden I could see the light bulb appear over Giacomo’s head as he emerged into familiar surroundings. The message penetrated through all the fear to his little brain. He finally realized that this little door meant that he could come and go as he pleased. It was no trap; it meant freedom!
Meanwhile, to our surprise, Giacomo continued to grow. After a couple of months he was a good two inches taller than Woodrow and three or more inches longer. He had one broken (or at least shorter) fang that bothered him not even a little. He also had polydactyly on both front paws. Each had an extra toe sticking out on the inside. They looked a lot like thumbs. One other thing was quickly noticeable about Giacomo—he was left-pawed. I called his left front paw “Lefty”. If it came towards you, it generally meant business.
During his first summer in Enfield Giacomo cleaned out the mole colony that had resumed residency when Woodrow retired as master exterminator a few years earlier.
For the most part Giacomo followed Woodrow around the house and the yard. Woodrow habitually came in to the bedroom every morning when my alarm went off at 5 AM. Giacomo began to join us. I was expected to acknowledge both of them, although Woodrow wanted nothing more than a rub or two on his head. Giacomo liked to be rubbed all the way down his spine, but he did not like his belly rubbed.
In the summer the coolest sport for a nap was this sink. Giacomo learned this trick from Woodrow.
From the start Giacomo preferred me over Sue. Whenever I sat down on a chair he jumped onto my lap. If I was seated at my desk (which was really a tabletop astride two file cabinets), he often got bored and went exploring on the table. If I was watching TV, he lay lengthwise on my lap (on a stadium blanket that I always set there) when he was younger and across it when he got older. I don’t know why he changed. Whenever I lay down he walked (he was so long that he hardly needed to jump) up onto the bed and settled himself next to me.
I never teased Giacomo in the way that I tortured Woodrow with that stick and feather. However, I occasionally took advantage of the fact that he allowed me to do almost anything to him. I liked to lift him up over my head and make him pretend to walk on the ceiling.
Woodrow and Giacomo were left “home alone” during our trips to Village Italy in 2005 (described here) and Eastern Europe in 2007 (described here).
Suburban raccoons are too fat for cat doors.
Woodrow was still around for a startling occurrence in May of 2008. The cat door drew the attention of a masked varmint, a raccoon that was too chubby to fit through the opening. Raccoons are known to be very crafty, but this one used brute force to solve the problem. He made short work of my (very) amateurish carpentry by pulling the door out of its wooden frame in the window. Sue and I knew that the rascal had made it all the way into the house when we found the cat bowl empty and water all over the floor. Cats are very meticulous when drinking water; they seldom spill a drop. Raccoons are meticulous in a different way. They wash their food before they eat it; they always spill water, and they never clean up after they are finished eating.
Chick Comparetto let us borrow his Havahart trap, and he showed Sue how to use it. She then put it outside near the cat’s entrance (which we had temporarily closed off) and put some food in it. On the very first night the raccoon got caught in the trap. Sue and Chick then transported the raccoon—still in the cage—in her car across the Connecticut River to Suffield, where they released it in a wooded area.
Sue immortalized the raccoon adventure by recording a video of the release in Suffield. You can watch it here.
I bought a new sturdier cat door and affixed it to the board blocking the window a little more securely.
In the late summer of 2008 Woodrow died. He was eighteen years old, the same age that Rocky was at his death. Woodrow was weak and very ragged looking the last week or so. I stayed home with him on his last day.
Despite my closeness to him, I wasn’t overcome with grief when Woodrow died. The Woodrow that I wanted to remember was the devious rascal and hunter, not the decrepit bag of bones of his last few days. I still retain so many vivid memories of him. He was an immediate friend to everyone whom we let in through a human-sized door, but I think that, at least in his younger years, he would have fought to the death to defend against an intruder trying to get through the cat door.
I buried Woody under the burning bush, his favorite outdoor napping spot. I don’t honestly know whether Giacomo missed him as much as I did. He could not have missed him more.
Franklin.
For about a year Giacomo was our only pet. Then Sue learned that Betty’s friend, who was absolutely thrilled to find out how much we liked Giacomo, told Sue that she could have Giacomo’s litter-mate, whom she had named Frankie. I insisted on elongating his name to Franklin.
Franklin was black, like Giacomo, but he had short hair, and he was not as long and lean as his brother. I thought of them as the anteater and the aardvark. Giacomo was the bigger anteater with his luxurious fur coat. Franklin was the much less attractive aardvark.
Giacomo on the futon.
Giant Anteater
Aardvark
Pretty good analogy, no?
Franklin did not share Giacomo’s pleasant disposition and love of human companionship. He never fought with his brother, which we recognized as a big plus. However, Franklin did not especially like either Sue or me. He would only occasionally let us pet him. mostly when he was outside. Once or twice, however, I actually found him up on the bed with Giacomo, but after a couple of strokes he became antsy and departed.
This sturdier version of the cat door was installed with the new addition in 2013.
The aspect of living with us that Franklin hated the most was the monthly application of flea drops. I suspect that he had never been allowed outdoors at his previous residence. He discovered the cat door in the basement without our assistance, and he seemed to appreciate the freedom that it provided. However, he had never learned the fundamental lesson of civics class: with all freedom comes responsibility. In this case, the monthly flea drops were the price civilization exacted for his liberty.
This is the basement side, with a ramp down to the floor.
When the weather was warm Franklin put me through a frustrating and exhausting ritual every month. When I was sure that Franklin was in the house, I shut the door to the basement so that he could not retreat there. I then chased him from room to room trying to corner him. Sometimes he hid under one of the barnboard shelves in the library. When he did, I had to wait for him to move. Eventually I always trapped in the bedroom, where he would take refuge under the bed. I had to remove the mattress and box springs to get at him. I always eventually managed to apply the treatment, but the experience was a gigantic pain in the coondingy1.
In contrast, I merely waited for Giacomo to jump in my lap. He did not mind getting the drops at all. He trusted me completely.
Giacomo and Franklin stayed home together while Sue, I, and our friends the Corcorans toured Paris and the South of France in 2009 (described here). We also took a Russian River Cruise in 2010 (described here) and an ill-fated tour of South Italy the following year (described here). I learned of no untoward incidents either caused by or inflicted on either cat.
Franklin on the futon.
For some reason Franklin insisted on exploring our neighbor’s3 property. The gentleman who lived there called me aside while I was trimming the forsythia bush near his property one day and informed me that he had a problem with our cats. They made his dog bark too much. I told him that I would see what I could do.
I thought of responding, “Oh, you have a dog problem. I thought that you said that you had a cat problem.” After all, in Enfield, although dogs must be fenced in or kept on a leash, there is no law against cats roaming free.
I was pretty certain that Franklin was the instigator. Whenever I saw him near the neighbor’s property, I chased him back to our yard. However, I worked all day, and I slept at night. Franklin had ample opportunities to roam. One day, when I was not home, the dog owner accosted Sue and told her that if he caught one of our cats on his property, he would kill it. I won’t repeat Sue’s precise response, but it was not neighborly.
The situation did not escalate any further. I wrote a letter to the neighbors that explained the situation with our cats and offered to pay if they did any damage. Shortly thereafter the family got rid of its noisy dog, and eventually the man of the house departed as well.
In 2012 Franklin got hit by a car on North Street. I did not dig a grave for him, the only domestic animal that I have ever really disliked.
After Franklin’s death Giacomo was our only pet3 for quite a few years. He went through a period in which he spent a lot of time on Allen Street, a dead-end street that was directly across North Street (the site of Franklin’s untimely demise) from our house. Quite a few outdoor cats lived in the neighborhood and congregated informally. The situation reminded me of the old Top Cat cartoons.
I did not like this new lifestyle, but there was not much that I could do about it without turning Giacomo into an indoor cat. Sue was equally concerned. She came to see me when I was in my easy chair wearing my cardigan sweater and reading a magazine. She said, “Ward, I ‘m worried about Giacomo.”
Giacomo on the bed.
Although I don’t remember attributing his injury to the evil influence of the other gang members, one day Giacomo came home with a wound that had formed an abscess. The vet who examined him told me that if this happened again, we might need to keep him inside. That was something that we really wanted to avoid. She also told me that he definitely had a heart murmur, but she did not recommend doing anything about it. It made me think, however, that Giacomo would probably not match the longevity records of Rocky and Woodrow.
Bob in 2017.
Eventually Giacomo’s wanderlust subsided. By 2016 he almost never left the property. That was the year that another black cat decided that he wanted to take up resident at the Slanetz house, home of Sue’s siblings, Don and Betty, and their father, Art. Betty and Art were quite fond of the newcomer, a very stocky fellow with an inflexible tail that measured only four or five inches. Betty named him Bob in honor of his tail—bobcats are sometimes seen in the area. The tail reminded me more of a crank or handle.
A good view of the crank.
Unfortunately, Betty’s own cat had a fiercely hostile reaction to Bob’s presence. Betty therefore asked Sue to adopt him, and, needless to say, Sue agreed. Bob moved into our house on December 8, 2016, and for about two or three weeks Bob and Giacomo hissed at each other. They eventually became tolerant and, in time, quite friendly.
Giacomo held down the fort in Enfield by himself on several of our tours and cruises. Bob and Giacomo stayed in the house by themselves while we took the bridge trip/vacation in Hawaii in 2018 (details here).
Giacomo was much longer.
Not to mention his tail.
Bob exploring in the back yard.
Bob developed one very peculiar tendency. From the beginning his joints were not very flexible, especially by cats’ standards. Something also seemed to itch him on his spine, and he tried desperately to get at it with his teeth. To do this he rested his weight on one shoulder and used a back leg to spin around furiously. It reminded me of someone breakdancing.
After a while some tufts appeared on Bob’s spine. They looked like matted clumps of fur, but he would not let us touch them at all. They kept getting bigger, and eventually it became clear that they were growths of some kind. Maybe we should have taken him to the vet, but at the time Bob would not let me touch him under any conditions. Sue decided to let him be. Every so often she would say to him, “Oh, Bob, what am I going to do with you?”
Prior to Bob’s arrival Giacomo almost never made a sound unless I rolled over his tail with my office chair. Bob was quite talkative, and he had a pleasant voice. Giacomo began to vocalize, too, but he almost always squawked at a high volume. He sounded just like a blue jay. This was his only bad habit. We just had to put up with it.
Giacomo and Sue sometimes napped together.
Meanwhile, Giacomo was definitely beginning to show his age. Whereas he formerly sprang up to my lap or to his favorite perch on the back of the sofa, by 2019 he didn’t jump at all. He had to climb. He had also lost the ability (or at least the inclination) to retract his claws. When he walked on a bare floor, he always made click-click sounds. His right front paw also definitely bothered him. He never ran, and he walked with a noticeable limp.
This is a rare shot. B0b was seldom allowed in Giacomo’s main napping spot atop the couch. Bob always stuck out his right rear leg when resting.
I spent the week after Thanksgiving in 2019 in San Francisco at the NABC4 tournament (described here). Between and after the rounds my thoughts often turned to Giacomo. I really feared that he might die while I was gone. I would not have been too surprised if Bob had died as well.
I was wrong on both counts. Both Bob and Giacomo were still reasonably healthy and active when the Pandemic changed all of our lives in March of 2020.
1. I learned this word while I was in the army. I think that it is derived from a Korean word that sounds similar.
2. Because of the location of our house, we really had only one next-door neighbor, the residents of 1 Hamilton Court. I think that the person with whom I conversed was named Chris Simons. He no longer lives there in 2022, but I think that his wife still does.
3. I am not counting our third rabbit. At some point before, during, or after Franklin’s stay with us at 41 North Street, Sue accepted (without consulting me) another rabbit from a relative or a friend of a relative. She explained that it could live outdoors, and she promised that she would care for it. She neglected it, and it died within a month or two.
4. Prior to the Pandemic three North American Bridge Championships were held every year at rotating sites by the American Contract Bridge League.
