Strays

I pick up strays like stereotypical high school jocks pick up cheerleaders.  This has been happening for years, but I have no idea why.  I never intend to pick up a new stray, it just happens. 

Once I was driving from my parents’ house on the east side of the state back here to the west side of the state. Normally I do the entire 5-ish hour drive straight through without stopping, but this time I actually had to pull over at a rest stop to go to the bathroom.  Knew I shouldn’t have had that extra hot chocolate. 

As I emerged from the surprisingly not-stinky restroom, I heard a mewling coming from a box near the door.  I discovered that some jerk had left two tiny kittens in that box with no food or water and one dirty towel.  I waited around for about 20 minutes, but no one else came to the rest stop.  Not wanting to just leave them, I packed them into my car and dealt with 2 crying kittens for the next three and a half hours. 

I eventually learned that River and Zoe were only about 6 weeks old, a full two weeks too young to be away from their mother.  They were fostered out to a volunteer at the humane society and were eventually adopted.

Also, my ability for find strays is not limited to animals. 

Every time I take the ferry, I find a stray.  The first time this happened, I met Mary.  Mary was a very nice old lady from Georgia (although she pronounced it with a distinct drawl rather than my rather clipped Yankee accent).   During this hour-long ferry ride, I got to hear about her whole family.  I’m not kidding. She started with when her family came through Ellis Island and didn’t stop until I learned about Uncle Lloyd and Cousin Greta and her dear grandmother’s jewelry collection.

Ferry, take two: I was working on some origami cranes that I was planning on donating to a veteran’s hospital.  This young girl, I would guess she was in middle school, kept trying to surreptitiously look at what I was doing over the back of her chair.  Since she seemed to be so interested in what I was doing, I began a new string of cranes and gave them to her.  As she grinned shyly at me, her grandmother told me that I had made both of their days.  They had missed the last ferry because the grandmother’s chemo had gone a little longer than usual.  They had just received news that the cancer had spread to two different parts of the body and the prognosis was not good.  The grandmother told me that this was the best thing to happen to them in a long time and that this was the first time she had seen her granddaughter smile in about a month.  Needless to say, I made the grandmother a string of cranes, too.

This brings me to today.  I caught the bus so that I could run some errands between classes.  As I was getting off the bus, an older man asked if I would help him cross the street.  He walked with both a cane and a guide stick for blind people.  As he walked with me across the street, he began telling me all about his life.  His name is Roy and he served in Vietnam.  When he got back to the US, he got hit by a car and had a double compound fracture in his left leg, but after the doctor put two rods in it and used 32 stitches, he was fine.  In fact, he was up and walking on it in a matter of weeks.  Oh, and, by the way, I have a very youthful voice.  Roy is 70, although people tell him he doesn’t look a day over 60, so everyone has a youthful voice to his ears.  Was I going to the grocery store? No? Well, he was going to the Apple Store because his family got him a special retina computer that can enlarge and highlight text to the point where he can read it, so he’s going to take a class at the Apple Store.

I learned all of this in the less than ten minutes I was walking him to the store (hey, I wasn’t about to let a 70-year-old blind man wander around trying to find the dang store when it only took me a few extra minutes to make sure he got there safely.  I’m a terrible person, but not THAT terrible).

So there you have it.  My strays.  Not all of them, mind you, but some of the standouts.  I swear I live the strangest life.