On a morning walk, I came across a newspaper carelessly tossed on someone's lawn, and through the blue plastic bag that kept it dry from rain and dew, I read in passing quickly by, headlines that capped a small column on the far right-hand corner of the page: "Woman Fined for Keeping 100 Cats," which caused me to remember a conversation with a friend of mine a week or so before. I smiled, walking along, as I replayed it in my head, and in fact, am smiling now as I write this.
My friend Sally and I had been discussing a weekend I had just spent at the home of my older son and his wife and three children and two cats, one of which is quite nasty -- cat, that is -- my son, daughter-in-law, and the children, of course are delightful.
"If you had a choice," Sally asked, "which would you choose for house pet, cat or dog?"
"Well," I said, "I'm really not an animal lover. Except for elephants. I love elephants, but they would hardly do as house pets."
I told her that although I had several times encountered elephants in zoos in this country, it wasn't until I was in Sri Lanka and visiting a place where baby elephants who were orphaned by poachers in the jungle were cared for, that I fell wholeheartedly in love with that great, lumbering, somehow gentle species.
"I was privileged to feed one of the 'babies'," I said to Sally. "I held an enormous nippled bottle of milk to its mouth, and the dear little thing --well, actually, the dear BIG thing (it stood taller than I) practically sucked my arm in up to my elbow."
"Yuck! Elephants!" my friend Sally said. "I saw two of them mating once. My ex and I were in Africa. He told me not to look, but I did anyway. My God! At first I thought one of them had five legs."
It took me a minute to get the picture, and then at least three minutes to stop giggling.