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Thursday, June 19th, 2003
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8:16a - Pets that ran away
My mind is troubled now, wandering back to bygone times best not remembered. The circumstances of today remind me of them, though. The past is inescapable. One's history defines them, molds them, makes them who they are. My past was harsh, so am I. The episode in my past haunting me today began in 1987, and arguably ended in 1989, which was the year I last saw Rae, my ex-wife. She was dressed well but frumpily and out of fashion in a blue business suit. Her attorney and her lover were also there. It was a courtroom. It was a temporary custody hearing, which I being male, lost by default. A battle, not a war, though. I never loose wars. It would be unlike me to miss enough details or fail to have the persistence to win in the end, no matter how long the end takes.
Rae was never seen again after that by me or by her attorney or by the judge. I found her, not in person or I would have seen her, but with the long reach of an excellent staff of investigators some months later in Florida where she was strung out and pregnant living with a man who's rap sheet took three reams of paper to copy at the court house. My young son caught in that ghastly scene.
She failed to appear at any more court hearings, she dug her own grave more well than I ever could have. In the end. I won. What I won was less certain. That has troubled me every year since. On paper it was clear, all property and soul legal custody of our child. In practice things are never so clear.
I have no kind words to say about Rae, but she taught me much of life through an experience no one would choose to live. I do owe her that, and did love her, the stray I took in because she had no other place to go after tragic events in life left her without parents. I was sympathetic, and then when she became pregnant I was responsible.
I was still being responsible six years later as it occurred to me, rather like a bolt out of the blue, "Why the fuck am I still feeding her cat?" Baxter was the cat's name. He was an ugly, scruffy yellow and white cat found in a parking lot half starved and three quarters feral, which never changed.
It was a very unpleasant cat. Five minutes later it was a very dead cat, too. It ran away.
Six years after that is today. I'm going to the hospital now for my son to have his eighth major surgery. This time to fuse the vertebra in his back and fix the scoliosis that developed from spending all his life in a wheel chair. It's been a hard life for him without legs that work, one made no better by a mother that has never come to visit once.
I'd have given her, her damned cat if she had.
current mood: worried (1 comment |comment on this)
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