A true story for your enjoyment – with pictures! I would be interested in hearing critiques of the writing too.
Some time ago I serendipitously discovered the mythical (or so it seemed at times) object that I had been seeking for so long – a sacred Vessel that my cat would deign to drink out of (other than the toilet, of course). I had tried plastic dishes, wooden bowls, wide ceramic platters…. nothing was good enough. I wondered how she even survived with drinking so little.
Tiring of my thick headedness, Fate intervened at last by bestowing upon me a series of injuries that I received during jiu-jitsu practice. First my elbow, then my shoulder in multiple places, then my bicep, then everything at once. Icing all my injuries separately was incredibly time consuming and arranging and securing all the ice bags at once with my free arm required the dexterity of Houdini. I began to develop a variety of strategies – icing my injuries was quickly becoming a hobby in of itself.
Then I had an idea: if I had a big bucket, I could ice everything at once! I secured a 5 gallon bucket, scooped up some snow, then filled it with water….and it worked! Much faster and MUCH colder – damn it was cold! Clearly an improvement, and it worked well enough for a while, but I soon found myself wanting more, yearning for the perfect icing container – one long enough and deep enough that I could submerge my entire arm all the way up to and including my shoulder.
Things quickly spiraled out of control. The five-gallon bucket was no longer enough. It was replaced with six gallon paint buckets…then a variety of plastic trash cans “borrowed” from the work place… buckets of all sizes filled with water began to accumulate in the living room. Finally I hit rock bottom. Feng shui be damned; I purchased a huge plastic trash container from Home Depot, positioned it squarely in the middle of the floor, and cemented its location by siphoning hundreds of pounds of water into it. I would scoop a bucket or two of water out, dump multiple buckets of snow in, turn the thermostat on high, then bare-chested and with a winter hat on I would plunge my arm into the ice water for 15 minutes. Friends looked at me strangely when I explained all this to them, but they just didn’t understand.
Weeks passed.
Then, as if awakening from a dream, I noticed several things: (1) My injuries were feeling a lot better; (2) I seemed to have deepened my pain threshold considerably (or done some lasting damage to temperature sensing nerves in my arm); and (3) the cat was drinking from the ice buckets!
She loved it! She would stand on two legs and lean against the 5-gallon plastic bucket and drink and drink, as if making up for years of thirst. And her favorite was to climb up on the chair that I kneeled on while icing in the giant Home Depot container, balance on two legs, and lap up the water from that mother of all icing containers. Once I discovered that, I got rid of all the smaller pails and we shared the giant one. Sometimes we even used it together. Not only was it incredibly cute, but I never had to worry about refilling her water. I mean, how quickly does it take a cat to make a dent in 50 gallons of water?
The injuries gradually recovered and I stopped icing, but I couldn’t bring myself to remove the container. She drank from it until her untimely death, several months ago, the result of an inexplicable hit and run on a rural road with virtually no traffic. The giant container remained for several days. I remember two things in particular from the period following her death – the feeling of anticipating lapping sounds that were never there and the heavy scrape of plastic on wood mingled with a soft sloshing cutting the silence as I slowly dragged the half empty bucket out of the house to the shed.
I still miss her.
