Hello again, Dorene here.
I drive around for a living, and am a constant NPR listener. Yesterday, I heard an interesting piece on, yes, you guessed it, the decline of door knobs.
Apparently the city of Vancouver, BC, which I was often raised in, has removed and replaced all its door knobs with “levers,” due to an aging and arthritic population. As one who has premature arthritis, I can relate, but it got me to thinking about our desert cat that we adopted in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
I was supposed to visit home from my Greek boarding school over the December holidays, and I was the one that was ordered to name him (naming things is my forté – even my car, bikes and canoe have names). However, by the time that I got there, “Kitten” had stuck (almost as bad as my first black Border Collie who came named Blackie – I’ll blog on him later).
At any rate, Kitten was allowed to be an indoor/outdoor cat (which led to his demise in Seattle when he was eaten by coyotes). However, despite the fact that he lived in the World’s Largest Litter Box (the Sahara Desert) he felt that he had to go inside to use the facilities. And things would sometimes get Very Urgent for him.
So, he had to talk his way through humans with opposable thumbs to open the double glass doors to the marble lobby, then run up two floors to our appartment. There, he would LAUNCH himself in desperation onto our front door LEVER and dash inside to the litter box. You could hear the audible sigh of relief that he would have in getting there. Silly cat.
I have pictures of him but nothing scanned, I’ll paw through my old photos and shoot something across some day with more stories of Kitten, he was quite the character!
More later – Dorene