The trouble with Ginger

Thursday, September 05, 2013

Sharon’s cat Ginger went into surgery today.

Ginger, an orange and white adult male, showed up in the neighborhood about six weeks ago.

Someone had dumped him on the street, and he went from house to house, taking gifts of food where he could.

The problem is he was particularly not savvy when it came to life on the street, and so wander from this side to that side as unconcerned about traffic as traffic was about him.

Friendly as hell, Ginger (named for his color and for one of Sharon’s favorite drummers – no, not Keith Moon) went up to anybody and everybody, but nobody apparently wanted to actually take him in.

He began to get dirty and Sharon vowed to save him.

He actually came into the house willingly, but also wanted to go back out – a bit of wander foot he still retains.

For Sharon, this was the reincarnation of another cat who wandered in our lives some years ago – called Telly – and who we managed to keep for 11 months. Ginger like Telly follows her around everywhere and makes a suburb paper weight whenever she is settled at her desk or reading chair.

Telly differed in only that he ached to come into our house, and made a campaign of it, waiting outside our front door until we came out, at which point, he attempted to follow Sharon down the street. We tried sneaking out the side or back doors, but he was wise to us, and so inevitably, we took Telly in.

He was like a dog he was so loyal, following Sharon everywhere she went, always being there, but not intrusive, just in the same room, or always within the same reach.

He was playful with our other cats, and had a rivalry with my cat Max that often resulted in chases in the middle of the night – which apparently brought on Telly’s demise.

Suffering from a shoulder injury, I sometimes had to sleep in a chair in the livingroom, which was the case one night when Max chased Telly and Telly leaped off a table, and then died in mid-air. This was from an unsuspected heart ailment we later discovered, but at the time, I managed to catch the cat before he hit the floor and he died in my hands.

I had to wake Sharon to tell her, something she never got over.

But when she saw Ginger, she felt a connection, as if Telly had come back, and indeed, Ginger acts very much like Telly in every respect, even to the point of taunting our female cat Jen.

But he came with a flaw, a large lump on his side, that when we had checked out, was either a hernia or a benign tumor. The vet told us to watch to see if it gets larger, rather than operate right off.

Last week, the lump started to get larger, and so we took the cat back to check out, and today, I took him for surgery.

Needless to say, Sharon is worried that history might repeat itself. I hope she is wrong.