Updated Letter from Mrs. Rock

I put the old edited stuff back in the post about Mrs. Rock, so its title is partially inaccurate now. Some stuff I'm still leaving out. Maybe I'll put add it this fall or spring or something.

Peace out!

My Strongest Memory of Aston

When I was in 7th grade, my old cat, Pepper, started to get sick. I remember it was in 7th grade because the last time I saw her was when my mom picked me up from an Aston soccer practice, and I was only with Aston during 7th grade.

I remember the practices were held on some school campus that I thought was absolutely huge, and it was quite a drive for me, especially compared to BYC where I used to play (and could walk to if I asked). Our coach was Scottish, the father of Bill Randall, and the team was full of misfits but we were all friends. I remember there were two kids named Ed and Kevin who were rough around the edges, but best friends, and really easy to get along with. They're the kind of kids who would see a friend getting in a fight in a street and beat the crap out of the other kid even if they didn't know why anyone was fighting, because they would just assume their friend was right and that was all there was to it. There was also another kid named Ian who I remember pretty clearly because he was good at soccer, sort of strange, sort of pale, sort of small, pretty fast though. He had a little sister who looked way too much like him. There might have been a red-headed kid named Michael Conway on that team, too, but I can't remember. Pat MacCullough was also on the team. He was goofy, and got kicked in the kidney once and peed blood.

Anyway.

I remember practices were always really pretty. I don't know why, but I don't have any memories of practices at night or in storms. They're all at sunset in a large open field, and all very beautiful. I remember we had a practice on September 11th, 2001, and we saw a plane go across the sky and we were all worried. I think that's the only way I could figure out that I was actually on the team during 7th grade, not 6th.

Like I was saying, my cat Pepper was very sick at the time. I think she was just about as old at me, so probably 12 or 13 years old at that point. She had congestive heart failure, I think. She was on some medicines for it that my mom had to painfully force feed her or trick her into eating every day, but it didn't look like anything was helping.

Pepper started retaining fluid. She got really really bloated, and my dad would jokingly call her a basketball with ears (which didn't make sense because she was not orange). I remember that you could feel the liquid inside of her if you put a little pressure on her skin, and you could feel from her matte that she wasn't washing herself anymore. She looked sad, I remember thinking. I think one time my parents actually had the vet remove whatever fluid was building up in her, but it came back very quickly.

My parents inevitably had to deal with issue of euthenasia. My dad thought it was the right thing to do because he believed we were just making the cat suffer, and she wasn't enjoying life anymore, she was just in pain. My mom, I think, was too emotionally attached to Pepper, so she thought putting her to sleep was simply out of the picture. I remember they talked a couple times about some talk show in California that wanted to talk to couples that were having such issues, but I think they wanted them to bring Pepper to the filming of the show, and that was just ridiculous, so of course they would never do that.

One day, Tuesday or Thursday, after soccer practice in Aston - I think it was still light out, so it must have been pretty early in the season - my mom came to pick me up in whichever van we had at the time. I got in the back seat (couldn't ride passenger seat for some reason) and I saw Pepper next to me in the backseat, laying in a box. She wasn't moving much, and she was much bigger than any cat should be and way bigger than she had ever been when she was healthy. I didn't know what was going on, and I remember being kind of confused and worried. My mom told me we were taking her to the vet to put her to sleep, and she thought she would bring Pepper to practice so I could see her one more time and say goodbye. I can't remember if I cried right then or not. I loved that cat, and I still miss her.

We drove to the vet on the way home, and my mom asked me if I wanted to go in with her or not. I knew I would never be able to see something like that, so I waited in the car and my mom took the box with Pepper inside it into the building. I'm pretty positive I was crying by then, since that was the last time I would ever have seen Pepper alive. She came back out a little bit later. I can't remember if she had her body or not, because I know we had a funeral for Pepper but I think I would have been creeped out if she had brought the body back.

I asked Mom how Pepper looked when she was dying, and she said she just looked like she was going to sleep and that she looked happy. I believed her at the time, but I'm not so sure I can believe that anymore.

I don't remember the ride home. I remember that I cried a lot that night and I'm pretty sure my mom asked if I wanted to skip school the next day. I didn't skip, but I'm pretty sure I was a wreck the next night, too.

We didn't have very many good pictures of Pepper. The best one I think we could find, I think, is the one my mom framed and gave to me. It's a picture of Pepper sitting on two paws in front of the glass sliding door in the kitchen at our Brookside house, looking towards the camera with her green eyes. You can see that she doesn't have a tail, and you can see from her mix of brown and black fur that she was very much a mutt. There was still some sort of construction in our backyard at the time, so you could see hunter's orange wirefence in the background. My mom also gave me the last collar Pepper ever wore - it's old and yellow and beaten up and it's hanging on the frame of that picture in my room on my bedstand. I remember the first time I touched it, I just lost it. I've gotten a little better since then, but not much.

And of all the things I remember about my year with Aston, this is the strongest.

Peace out.

That was NOT a Safe Ride

This Saturday, Nupur and I went to see a Tom Stoppard play called "The Real Inspector Hound" being performed by a student group in Brown's T. F. Green building, which I'd say is about three-fourths of a mile away from either of our dorms. We got out of the play, I think, very shortly after 12:00AM (so by the it was technically Sunday morning). We started walking back towards our dorms, but we were both freezing the entire time we were watching the play and we were even more freezing now that we were walking outside. We really, really wanted a way to be not-freezing-our-faces-off.

The obvious answer, of course, is SafeRide, the free shuttle that goes around the Brown and RISD campuses. For the past couple days, Nupur and I kept seeing SafeRide vans with drivers just parked in the lot outside of B & H, and since that was essentially on our way back anyway, we figured we would go there. For the first time we could remember, there were no SafeRide vans in the parking lot of B & H. I don't think we saw any at all, not even any parked without drivers.

So we kept walking on, past B & H. We could see into the lounge (where I am right now) and see that no one was there, so we knew there was no way in. We kept walking around to the sliding-door entrance and I tried all three of the doors there - the central sliding doors and the two doors on either side - because I really wanted a break from the freezing (B & H usually has a good climate). None of the doors opened. We could see people in the computer lab - some people have cards that will let them swipe in - but we figured it wasn't even worth waiting to get the attention of the nearest person and ask to be let in, so we just went on and figured we would look for SafeRide on Thayer St.

So we made The Walk from B & H, down the brick pathway lined with trees, across Brook St., across the cement sidewalk between the Sci Li and MacMillan, and turned right onto Thayer St. Nupur thought she saw a SafeRide van parked, so we ran towards it screaming, but then we saw that it wasn't a SafeRide van. Then, thank god, a SafeRide van came driving right towards us from further up Thayer St., so we flagged it down, ran to the nearest stop, and got in.

Now, when you get into SafeRide, you're supposed to show them your Brown or RISD ID card so they know they're not just giving rides to crazy people who want free, safe rides in white vans with heaters on. Oh, yes, the heater was on and it was glorious. Anyway, the point is, the driver didn't check our IDs. We just got right in and he left as soon as we closed the door. That didn't make me feel very safe...?

We got in the van at 12:17AM.

As we were driving down Thayer St., the driver kept talking on his cell phone (but in walkie-talkie mode) in Spanish(?) to someone else. Just about all I could figure out was that it was also a guy. The only time our driver stopped talking on his cell phone was when he wasn't driving the van, which seemed completely backwards, but what was I going to do? So I just went with it, feeling once again, not very safe.

Our ride wasn't the most direct path. We went down Thayer St. some more, and I forget exactly where we went from there, but I remember we drove through the center of The Walk and I was upset that we hadn't just caught the SafeRide van crossing when we were there. Later on in the ride, the van actually stopped right outside the T. F. Green building, where Nupur and I had left the play. We could have just stayed inside and waiting and we would have been exactly as well off as we were before. We felt a little cheated, I think.

When we stopped at the T. F. Green, three more people got in - Peter Drinan, a really nice guy from New York in my Education class; Taylor, a very proud singer; and another girl whose name I unfortunately forgot as soon as she said it. Peter and Taylor were in a competition that night to see who knew more people - they were in that competition before the play, too, and Peter called my name just so he could prove to Taylor that he knew me.

When we got in the van, Peter said hello to me again to show again to Taylor that he knew more people than her. She introduced herself to me, and I said, "Hey, yeah, I'm Jeff, I've met you before!" She looked really confused. I'm pretty sure it was because I met her when she was drunk and she didn't have any memory of it. I guess she was a little worried of what I knew of her if she couldn't remember meeting me. I thought that was kind of interesting.

Nupur and I talked for the rest of the ride home. The other three got out at Keeney before the van went North to Pembroke so Nupur and I could get out.

It was 12:35AM when we got out of the van.

IT WAS NOT A SAFE RIDE.

Peace out!