The rescue of Bobo

Who is Bobo? We'll get to that eventually. Along with an explanation of why Bobo is really lucky that I drive a small car.

First, background for those who are just getting to know me. If you know all this stuff already, feel free to skip the next paragraph.

My mom went into the nursing home about two years ago. She lives about 50 miles away. This summer, my wife and I have been cleaning all the possessions out of her house, so we can sell it. It's been a lot of work for both of us (and we have found a lot of crazy stuff; plenty of photos to come), but we are nearly done now.

Our plan this Wednesday was to take a pair of pole lamps and two typewriters home with us. The thing is, I drive a smallish car, a Mazda Protege, and they don't have a lot of trunk space. We could only take the lamps home by folding down the rear seat. That was our plan.

But we also planned to visit my mom, and we guessed (correctly) that she would want to go out to supper with us: We normally drive to the Hardee's in Iron Mountain, about eight miles away, because she loves their chicken sandwiches and strawberry shakes. She is 85 and doesn't eat too much. So we have them cut in half, and I (and my wife) team up on the other half.

We couldn't put the lamps in the car right away because when we take her out, my mom goes in the front seat, and my wife sits in the back. That doesn't work if we have lamps in the trunk, poking into the back seat. Besides, her wheelchair also has to go into the trunk. It's a lot of wrestling around, but we're getting fairly adept at squeezing that thing into the trunk and closing the lid.

So, we agreed, we'll leave the lamps in the house and return after supper to pick them up before driving home. No problem.

Sure enough, my mom broadly hinted that she would like to go out, so before long we were all in my little car, heading for Hardee's. We had our supper, took her back to her room, kissed her good-bye, stopped at K-Mart (my wife needed new shoes and cat food--not for herself; for our cats) and then drove back to the house to get the lamps.

By now, it was getting dark--the sun was already setting. I turned the car around and backed it towards the back door, in order to put the lamps in the trunk easily. We saw a cat next to the garage, just sitting there and looking at us. The neighbor has cats, and they roam around, so maybe it's one of hers, I thought. After I stopped, I went around to unlatch the back seat, while my wife went to make friends with the cat.

Then she called me over. "It's caught," she said.

Sure enough. The cat was wearing a collar with a chain attached, and the chain had managed to get itself snagged on some broken concrete near the corner of the garage. It was caught in two places. The cat didn't seem to be stressed about it, but it clearly couldn't get free, either. I tried a tug or two on the chain, but it didn't work. By now it was getting pretty dark.

Whose cat is it? We looked at the tags on the collar, and I was able to make out the name of a city in Wisconsin, about 150 miles away. I tried tugging again, got nowhere, and told my wife to get the neighbor over--and a flashlight. She left.

I tried wiggling the chain, turning it this way and that. No progress. Then I tried the other end of the chain and turned that while pulling it up and out. Suddenly, it got free, and soon it was free at the other place, too. Freedom!

I picked up the cat and the chain and walked over to the neighbor's back door, where my wife was waiting. It was a pretty big cat, a good armload, and I noticed that it didn't have a tail. For its part, the cat was quite content to be carried.

I arrived at the same moment the neighbor got to the door. When she saw what I was carrying, she started laughing and crying at the same time. "That's my Bobo!"

Bobo is a Manx cat who has been a part of her family for about 16 years. Besides not having a tail, she has been declawed, the neighbor said, so she would have been defenseless if some mean critters had come along.

But now Bobo was safe again in mom's arms, and she hugged her. She also hugged both of us. We got our lamps, put them in the trunk/back seat. Locked things up, got in the car and headed out into the night. "You made a friend," my wife said. (Well, she was a friend already. In fact, it's her son and daughter-in-law who want to buy the house.)

As I was driving home, I was thinking: If my car hadn't been so small that we had to return to the house to get the lamps, we wouldn't have been there to rescue Bobo from his predicament. And then what would have happened?