j020929 (imported)
September 29, 2002
What is it with Sundays around this place?
Though I refused to hang around the Atlanta Bread Company Friday morning for twenty minutes trying to get my cinnamon rolls, I did hang around it ten minutes yesterday morning just to get a cup of their vanilla nut coffee. I’ll always wait for the frou frou coffee, you know. Yesterday was my day to do volunteer work for the animal shelter, you see, and I had to be at a local pet store at nine o’clock to help with pet adoptions.
Ten minutes isn’t long to wait at all when there’s an interesting group in front of you.
First, there was the couple who picked out a whole bunch of stuff to buy and tried to use an Alabama Bread Company coupon for a discount, not realizing they were in the Atlanta Bread Company. Then there was the woman directly in front of me, who did an end-run around the two women in front of her while they were picking out the delicacies they wanted from the bakery section, and ordered her latte frappe cappalabootay or whatever the hell those things are called. I’m frou frou, but I’m not that frou frou. The two women who’d been circumvented stood and sniped at the line cutter (what is it with people cutting in line at this place, anyway?) where she couln’t hear them.
I, of course, could hear everything they said because I was right beside them.
I ordered my coffee -
"The biggest one you’ve got, please," I said.
"Trying to wake up?" the girl behind the counter asked me, grinning broadly.
I returned her smile. "No, I just like the coffee a lot but I have no idea what the biggest one is called. I know it isn’t ‘large’," I told her.
Turns out the sizes are short, tall, and grande, or some such thing. Whatever happened to small, medium, and large? The high price of yuppiedom, I suppose.
- was given a not-nearly-as-big-as-I’d-like cup, and filled it myself from a carafe off to the side. I left it black because I’d brought my own container of creamer, which was out in the car. Weird? Sure, but you never know what the choices are going to be when you’re getting coffee from a store. Most of the yuppie coffee places seem to only have cream, whole milk, and skim milk to put in their coffee. Yuck. I don’t eat a lot of super-processed chemical-laden foods, but non-dairy creamer (actually, one specific brand, N’Joy. Like, the boy band of non-dairy creamers, or something) is one I have daily.
I mixed the creamer into my coffee in the car - because I’d also brought something to stir with, thinking ahead kind of guy I am - and drove to the pet store. I grabbed my coffee and the copy of Men’s Health I’d brought for the slow moments in the car and walked to the front of the store. An employee was standing there, smoking a cigarette. She stopped me as I was about to go into the partially open front door.
"The registers don’t open until nine," she said. It was about five till.
"Actually I’m not here to shop," I said, "can you tell me if this is the store where the Animal Control group will be adopting out pets? I’m one of the volunteers."
She didn’t know, but told me there was a calendar inside that told who would be there on what day. I had asked her because there are two big pet stores within a mile of one another, PetsMart (or PetSmart, for us cat people. Close your mail client, dog folks) and PetCo. The lady from Animal Control, whom I shall call Mary from now on, had told me the location of which store to go to, but gave me the name of the other, so I was a little confused. On the calendar in the store, for today’s date there was a little ‘HAS’ pencilled in.
After careful consideration, I decided that ‘HAS’ most probably stood for ‘Huntsville Animal Shelter’, but asked one of the ladies from another adoption place (actually, from the place where we got Tubby and Miz Poo) to make sure and she confirmed that I was right. I told her I was there to volunteer with Mary. Believe it or not, she remembered me. Not only did she remember that I’d adopted cats from her, she remembered Tubby and Miz Poo and the names (Jack and Tea) they’d originally had while with her place. I told her my name, because that was the one thing she didn’t remember. Until I told her.
"Yes," she said, "You were in the paper, weren’t you? Because you went from this…" She held her hands far apart. "To this," she finished, and brought her hands close together.
Oh, the prices we rich and famous must pay.
"Yeah," I said, grinning in the way that makes me look just more than slightly addled, "that was me. One of the cats we got from you did just the opposite from me. He weighs about twenty four pounds now."
She was suitably impressed with Tubby’s girth. I’d actually meant to bring pictures to show her but I’d forgotten them in my desire to make sure I brought everything necessary to properly season my coffee. She pointed to the back of the store and told me the Animal Control group was usually back there. I went to the back of the store, coffee and magazine in hand, and looked around.
I was all alone.
A couple of minutes passed, then the store manager walked up and told me we’d be put in the middle of the store instead. Normally there’s an obedience school taught there, but the trainer is out of town this week so Animal Control was getting the prime (read: high traffic) location in the store. We moved several cages up to the sectioned off area, rearranged all the folding chairs there, and made ready for the morning.
Mary arrived, a kitty carrier in each hand. In one, I saw a single young cat laying down and looking relaxed. The other was stuffed with tiny kittens, and one of them was splayed across the wire front of the carrier, clinging to it with all four paws like Spiderman. We spoke briefly - I told her about us being in the middle of the store instead of the back, which made her happy - and she told me to go get the black and white springer spaniel out of the cage directly behind the driver’s seat of the dogcatcher truck parked in front of the store.
The dogcatcher’s truck has six big cages, three on a side. The whole back of the truck is enclosed and you can only see three doors on each side. When you open a door you actually see the cage, which in turn has its own door. I walked out to the truck and fetched the spaniel from the cage. I led the dog, which we nicknamed Jerry (get it? A springer spaniel named Jerry! Only upon closer examination we discovered that Jerry was really Jeri) into the store and put her into one of the large cages. Mary had unloaded the cats into two of the smaller ones. In one cage was the teen cat who was still all relaxed, and in the other were three sibling kittens wired to the gills. They were like a little tornado in the cage, whirling and yowling and spitting and fighting. I was reminded of the Tasmanian Devil from old (read: back when they were good and violent) Looney Toons.
Kittens rock.
I went back outside to get another dog. When I opened the door to the cage right behind the passenger seat, a crowd of six little pointer puppy heads - three black and three butterscotch - all swivelled and looked up at me expectantly as one. I thought maybe Mary would have a carrier for them so I closed the door and walked around to the other side of the truck. There was a girl who looked to be about the spud’s age standing there next to an open cage door and looking in. She turned to me helplessly when I came around the front end of the truck.
"I think we have a problem," she said.
I walked over to the open cage door and looked in. There was a small brown sheltie mix in there, cowering and quivering in a small pile in the back. Both the dog and the inside of the cage were streaked and coated with shit.
Shit and blood.
