A Happy Number

None of my teachers ever told me that X was a happy number. This morning I realized that it is. What suddenly occurred to me is that X equals the number of creatures in a household, both human and animal. There are so many coming and going around here I have a hard time figuring what X equals around here, but when all is well, it is a happy number.

X - Y, however, is a sad number. That is the number of living things in a household minus those who have gone. In math you could just add Y to the equation and once more have X. Life isn't like that. Once the equation becomes X - Y, it stays there forever. Even if Y only equals 1, there is no number of creatures you can add that will balance the equation again. Ever.

Sometime last night the value of Y increased by 1 in our home. Cherokee passed away during the night.

Cherokee has always had trouble getting around what with age (unknown, but old) and arthritis with occasional bursts of energy and increased activity, so we didn't notice until Friday he was really getting feeble. By Saturday morning he was staggering and lurching when he tried to walk. That was when I noticed that his right eye had collapsed.

I picked him up and carried him over to the vet nearby, where I was met by a cheerful young veterinary assistant of which there were several. He let me take Cherokee into the examining room right away.

He gave my friend a rather quick, cursory examination and said something about him being in a bad way, probably renal failure. "But we won't know for sure until we get the blood tests back and the x-rays. Takes a couple of days. The blood test is $250, and the x-rays probably another 50 or 60."

I thought it rather odd that he should be more concerned with the money end of things rather than what he could do for Cherokee. But the cat seemed to be in pretty bad shape. It has been my experience that renal failure almost always ends in agonizing death after much suffering.

"No," I said, "let's just put him to sleep."

"All right; that'll be $35 for the office call, $35 to put him down, and a $25 disposal fee."

Now, Patty and I make pretty good money between us, and the amounts he'd mentioned wouldn't have been a hardship. But I was very offended by the way he kept bringing up money, as if that were the only consideration. Without a word I picked up Cherokee and walked out the door. As you can imagine I was pretty upset. The guy yelled at me, "Hey! You owe me $35 for the office call!"

All the way home I was thinking, "Please follow me out into the street asking for money." I had already planned to set the cat down and beat that a**hole to a bloody pulp. I didn't expect him to feel as keenly as I did the impending loss of a member of my family, but his callous (to me) manner was inexcusable. I will go back and pay him; after all, I went to him. He didn't drag me in off the street.

By the time I got him home, Cherokee's other eye had collapsed. I sat on the couch and held him for a while, but he squirmed so I had to put him on a rug by the window, his favorite resting place. He lay there quietly the rest of the evening, his chest slowly rising and falling, the breaths becoming fewer and weaker until they stopped.

We buried him in the back yard this morning.

X - Y; a sad number.

In Loving Memory of Cherokee

Copyright © David Yehudah
December 4, 2001