My New Roommates

 

  My New Roommates

 

  Shamiel, Shamazel, Hasenpfeffer Incorporated. This famous line is from the 1976 – 1983 sitcom, Lavern and Shirley. A spinoff of another famous sitcom, Happy Days. Lavern and Shirley follows the misadventures of two 20-something Milwaukee girls who work at the made up, Shotz Brewery. It basically followed the same pattern of Lucy and Ethel getting into mishaps and then solving them in 30 minutes, started by the legendary Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. I used to religiously watch the show when I was old enough to discover TV and when there were re-runs on every night of the week. My mother passed away when I was 10, in 1978, from cancer. Part of how I ended up coping with this loss is that I turned to TV to bring me comfort and make me laugh. Richie Cunningham, from Happy Days, was like a big brother to me (I had a half-brother named Richie that I saw a few times a year). And Lavern and Shirley were my goofy friends. 

 

Dorothy Dell Mitchell (Mom) and her gravestone in Gainseville, TX

Well, I have reached out and found Lavern and Shirley again in my time of need, but they are now two adorable fur balls I rescued last week. In the same way I turned to the sitcom to bring a smile to my face from the loss of my mother, I now turn to these two felines to bring a smile to my face in times of extreme loneliness. I picked out their names before they came to live with me because I have such a fondness for the sitcom, and I pictured them goofing around in the same way but ultimately loving and supporting each other through it all.

Lavern is a munchkin cat, after her father and Shirley comes from their mother who had a lot of Ocelot in her, a large breed, so, you can see how the comedy already comes packaged. To understand what these two beautiful creatures bring to my life, you need to know what my 2020 has looked like.

Shirley, on the left, and Lavern

In January 2020, before any of us had ever heard of the word, Covid, I went to a doctor and found out I have something called Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. This is a condition that diabetics get when they have neuropathy of the feet and they do serious damage without realizing it until it’s too late and surgery is the only option. So, I had surgery booked right away and I was able to take a short-term leave of absence from my job to recover and pick it back up. The doctor placed a metal rod on my calf bone and attached it to my ankle with a screw.

X-Ray showing my new metal rod - making new friends with Airport Security.

After a few weeks recovery I started work again and when Covid reared its ugly head, my company trained me in two hours to work remotely from home. Even better, I could continue my recovery at home. At this time, I was married and helping raise two step-kids and I had a black cat named Linus and a tuxedo named Cosmo.

Everything was going along fine and then one day, we discovered that the metal rod had begun to poke out of my leg, meaning my body was rejecting it, causing me to have to go back in to surgery and have an external applicator put on my leg. This is someone who had never had a surgeon's scalpel touch me in the first 52 years of my life!  The external applicator is a 'medieval torcher' looking device that attaches to your leg with bicycle spokes. It’s the same device Alex Smith had attached to his crushed leg that he acquired playing professional football, ESPN featured his recovery on one of their 30 for 30 specials. When I say they’re attached with bicycle spokes, I mean that they’re really attached with bicycle spokes. It’s the same company in Russia that’s been producing them for over 100 years, and they get them from a bicycle factory across the street.

The signature on my leg was the surgeon, to make sure they operated on the right leg.

I went back to my company and asked for another short term leave of absence to recover, but this time I was turned down and furloughed with very little prospect of getting another job until I recovered.

By this time, my wife of eight years decided that she didn’t want her kids to see me recovering in her house and she didn’t want me to recover under her roof, so she asked me to move out. Of course, there were other, deeper reasons for her feelings about this, but I won’t go into that, just understand that I was told I needed to leave but I had nowhere to go. I moved out to the couch out in our living room, while the wife and kids resumed their normal life. I felt like an animal at the zoo when they would walk by me on the way to other parts of the house. All the time I was desperately trying to find a place to live. My older sister had her whole family in a small house because of lost jobs, so that was not an option. I would leave the only house I had known for 8 years and everyone in my life, including, Cosmo and Linus, my sweet cats.

Graciously, my in-laws, soon to be ex-in-laws, rented me an extended stay hotel for a month, giving me a chance to keep looking for something a little more permanent. I was alone in a hotel but I had a roof over my head. Then, more grace, when a church’s benevolent group paid for another month. Then, even more grace, I applied for and was accepted to receive an artist grant which paid for another month. Friends also reached out and sent me some money to get by. Then, as if I hadn’t received enough grace, a friend from High School rented me a house for under what the going rent was and I've been able to recover and afford rent while I await the decision on state disability, which is 5+ months and counting without a decision.

The whole time I found myself recovering, I was on my own. A lot of people were on their own during this horrific period in life, but I have to say, I’ve never felt so alone, so purely on my own, physically. I felt God’s grace all around me but the immediate need of interaction with human beings or animals was not there. I went through Thanksgiving week completely by myself and I never imagined I would ever do that. It hurt so bad to wake up knowing I would be the only one around and go to bed, knowing the same thing.

Until a few weeks ago, I longed for some other soul in my life. Someone to look at and say, I'll go through today with you. And now, suddenly, I have two. Two ridiculously small, enormously powerful souls. Feline souls straight from our creator. Lavern and Shirley have come to save me, heal me, make me laugh and fill my life with love. Just the act of taking care of them has given me a purpose that I did not have before.

My foot is healing, my heart is healing, and I am healing, with their help. I just hope I can live up to their expectations and be the best cat daddy I can be.
I hear them coo and meow and look at me with their beautiful eyes and I see life worth fighting for. My hands have all kinds of scratches on them and I don’t care.

My peaceful babies

Shamiel, Shamazel, Hasenpfeffer Incorporated! We’re going to do it! Give us any chance we’ll take it…We’re going to make our dreams come true.

Until next time!

Doug