Friday, September 16, 2005
Feel Good Friday
Almost forgot! Thanks to "Anonymous" for reminding me. Since it's cat blogging Friday, today's installment features a man, who may be Cat Fancy magazine's Man of the Year (if there is such thing). Here's his story:
Might be a slow blogging weekend, but have a good one anyway. Go Eagles.
|
As a cat guy (manly, I know), I'm glad Mamou survived, and some good remains from the horror that Katrina brought to Mr. Lambert's life.
NEW ORLEANS - Ray Lambert came home for the first time since Katrina yesterday, and the first thing he did was batter frantically at his house with a sledgehammer.
The front and back doors were both blocked from the inside by furniture washed up against them, and somewhere in there, in the mess and the slime and the ruins of his life, were his eight cats.
"Bebe! Mamou! Anybody?" he called, poking his head into the holes he was bashing into his house.
Lambert, who had been on vacation with his wife in Maryland when the hurricane hit 16 days ago, got past military checkpoints with the help of a friend who is a cop. His was the only homeowner homecoming in a post-apocalyptic scene of miles and miles of trashed houses on the deserted streets of the 9th Ward yesterday.
"I'm going in," he said, smashing the glass of his front room window and climbing gingerly into the blue tract house on Keane Drive.
Lambert, 56, the drummer ina successful brass band, the Storyville Stompers, immediately found his wedding picture, covered in muck but salvageable. "Oh, my wife will be so happy," he said, whistling again anxiously for his pets.
He found a brass lamp his wife, Nora, had eyed in a small antique shop in the French Quarter for years and bought only afew weeks before the storm. He found his four drum kits, all ruined.
"Tammy! Whiskey! Magnolia!" Lambert called, hope starting to drain from his voice.
And then, from nowhere, a hysterical ball of brown fur came flying out of a dark corner and Lambert grabbed it up, weeping joyously.
"Mamou! Little Mamou!" he crooned. "This is the one I felt the most guilty about leaving. She always senses when I'm going away and gives me the pitiful 'Please don't leave' look."
Lambert gave the cat food and water, put her in a carrier and plunged back into the hellhole that was his house to look for the others.
Might be a slow blogging weekend, but have a good one anyway. Go Eagles.
