Humor: A few words to God about

A few words to God about
what went down

I remember having to bury a dead cat when I was 12.

I would not have minded terribly except he was not our cat.

We found him expired at our front-door and I swear I had never seen him around before.

My mother did not believe me though. "You're always luring strange cats home and feeding them," she said.

"Not this one," I said, staring down at the stiff black-and-white bundle on the mat.

"Well, you will have to bury him," she said.

I was reminded of this when I took my son Jack to the local shops one day.

Jack, then four, was taken by the sight of a huge pile of dog excrement on the footpath and suggested we should clean it up.

"No way," I said "Keep moving, Jack. That business is none of our business."

Of course, it would have been different if we had found that doggie do-do on our front-door mat. Then, as the man of the house, I would have a clear responsibility. I still would have complained though.

"But Katherine," I would say to my wife. "Why do I have to bury it? We haven't even got a dog. Can't we put an advertisement in the paper? Someone must know who it belongs to. Or we could get a funeral parlour in for a special ceremony: ashes to ashes, dung to dung."

We tried to make the burial of the unknown cat special like that when I was 12. A neighbourhood friend helped.

"I suppose we should say a few words," my mate Orville said as we bundled the dead cat into the hole we had dug.

"What are we going to say?" I said. "I know nothing about this cat, do you?"

"No, I've never seen him before. But it doesn't seem right to just cover him up with dirt without saying something," he said.

"Well, you say something."

"No, you should. He died at your front-door, not mine."

Heck, cats and dogs run away from home all the time and probably die on strangers' doorsteps quite often.

Only the other day a colleague confessed that he told his children that the family cat (which he had seen accidentally run over) had run away.

When I was seven our cat also allegedly ran away. I only found out from my parents when I was 27 that it got sick and had to be put to sleep. Possibly on someone else's doorstep, though they did not elaborate.

For the record, I did do the right thing at the graveside of the unknown cat when I was 12.

I said something like we always said before dinner: "Thank you God for this cat we are about to bury. Amen."

I just know, too, that Jack would have also insisted on a prayer if he had got his civic-minded way and we had buried the remains left by the dog on the footpath.

"Please accept unto this rubbish bin, oh Lord, this thing here left behind by one of your loved creatures," I would have said.

"Oh, and forgive the creature's owner because he probably knew not what his animal did. Shit happens, God."

©John Martin, November 22, 2002, September 19, 2000

NB: I called this site Dunno because I kept drawing a blank when I had to put a name to it