Cruising down the Alzheimer Highway without a roadmap

Found myself staring out the window this afternoon absently reaching for the name of the cat I've had for at least 18 years.

Reaching... reaching...

Just couldn't get hold of it.


Chloe!

Ya, it's Chloe of course! How could I forget? Chloe got fixed at the vet clinic where Karla Homolka worked back in the day. I'm pretty sure Karla was in jail by the time Chloe was at that clinic, but still, that leaves Chloe one degree of separation from Karla... and me two.

There's a history of Alzheimer's in my mother's family. Her mom, my grandmother, Leokadia Packull, spent the last twenty years of her life institutionalized. I used to go and see her from time to time. We were close when I was a youngster. We were still doing things the old-world way where the elders live with their children and their children's children.

Somewhere along the way we adopted the new-world custom of dropping the elders off in a home.

That seems a cruel abuse of language if you ask me.

"We're taking you out of your home and putting you in a home."

Leokadia, or Lotte as she styled herself, had three children.

My mother, who still has all her marbles rolling in the same direction.

And two uncles, both on the Alzheimer Highway. The younger one went to a home just before Christmas.

He's fifteen years older than me.

Maybe he's my roadmap.

The zen of Chloe

Falling Downs regulars will know Chloe. The evil cat from hell who spent years doing nothing but sulking on asbestos-wrapped heating pipes and slipping over to Mary Ann's house next door for kosher cat kibble.

Don't think I mentioned it before, but Chloe's only one or two degrees of separation from one of the country's most notorious serial killers, Paul Bernardo.

Here's the connection. Chloe got her operation at a cat clinic down Burlington way. Karla Homolka, Bernardo's wife and partner in the dastardly deeds that made them famous, used to work at that clinic.

Sends shivers up and down your spine, don't it? What's she thinking about as she's purring on those asbestos-wrapped pipes? The caress of Karla?

But Chloe has become a much more convivial cat since we moved to Falling Downs.

She's out and about every single day. Where we didn't see her for weeks on end, she's now making regular daily purr-pasts. She's a happy cat at last.

She mixes freely with the hounds, and has largely symbolic hiss-fests with the other cat.

She has, however, developed one peculiar habit I wish she hadn't. The cat box is in the basement, a few feet away from the wood furnace. I tend to spend a lot of time down there, because apparently the farm manager has decreed that keeping the wood fires burning is one of my responsibilities. Possibly it's the only one. In fact, she mockingly refers to that little space in front of the wood furnace as my "man cave," which is more than a little bit cruel.

Anyway, I've been noticing for quite some time that as soon as I park myself in front of the furnace, Chloe comes for a squat in the cat box. Without fail. Every time. Guaranteed.

I've gotten over my resentment. Join me, Chloe, as I keep the fires burning, and by all means have a shit while you're in the neighborhood. After all, we are doing jobs of equal import.

Without fire, we'd be dead. And if we couldn't shit, we'd be dead too.