The Frozen Four
Freschetta, Red Baron, Totino & DiGiorno (And We’re Not Talking About Pizza).
Cut to October 10, 2019.
I attended a lovely ceremony at my beloved previous employer, an ad agency called Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. We were celebrating the life of one of the world’s most amazing animal lovers with a pet adoption event in her honor. Her name was Allyson Bentley. As much as I wanted to, I was unable to take a kitten home that day.
Cut to two days later.
I was still thinking about Allyson and all she sacrificed on behalf of her furry friends — like battling the Bay Bridge traffic to the office every weekend to feed the strays in the parking lot. So I went to the East Bay SPCA in Dublin, California and found a little glassed-in room where a purring gray tabby was sprawled out on a teenager’s lap. I looked at the sign on the wall and learned his shelter name was “DiGiorno.” Adoption facilities often name littermates with a common theme. In this case, it was frozen pizza. The teenager and DiGiorno could not have been happier together.
Enter Freschetta.
I spotted a little black-and-white, Batman-faced female with a Riddler-like question mark on her back. I sat next to the teenager, Freschetta now in my lap, and we rubbed our respective kittens’ bellies as they purred in unison.
Enter the teenager’s mother.
“Your sister is destroyed.”
The teenager was unfazed.
Apparently, The Frozen Four had started their day in San Jose. So had this family of three. They had been tracking Totino, a little gray tabby with an adorable spot on his nose, and were in hot pursuit across the Bay Area. But they weren’t the only ones. Another young woman, we’ll call her Jane, had her heart set on Totino too. I imagined a death-defying, Cannonball Run-like race up 680. Jane got to Dublin first and was already finalizing the adoption papers when the mom and her two teen daughters arrived, only to find, well, leftovers. The younger sister was heartbroken. The older sister, with DiGiorno still purring on her lap, didn’t mind at all. Lucky for me, no one cared about Freschetta. Or Red Baron. His photo hanging on the wall was cute yet unremarkable. Another gray tabby. We assumed he had already been adopted because DiGiorno and Freschetta were the only two in the room. Or so we thought.
Enter Red Baron.
From under a pile of blankets, pops up two giant black ears, a tiny white body and three anything-but-unremarkable markings. One was a goatee. One was a circle. One was a heart. All stole mine. I scooped him up and put him next to his sister, both belly-up on my lap, happily exposing their spay-and-neuter stitches. Bob Barker would be so proud. They were near perfect film negatives of each other. An SPCA Volunteer walked by and I mentioned they had the wrong photo for him. By the time she got back with the Polaroid camera, I told her not to bother. I was taking Freschetta and Red Baron home. There was no way I could separate these two who were clearly meant to be littermates for life.
Everyone else seemed to fade away as the love swelled between the three of us — along with an odd odor. One of them farted on my lap. And my first maternal question spoken in a baby-calming tone was asked of them: “whooo diiiid thaaaat?”
Both of them.
Both of them did that for the next month while they got used to their new diet — and their new names: Sagan Saveria and Scotlan Bentley. Their middle names memorialize Saveria Caracciolo, my maternal grandmother, and Allyson Bentley, my maternal colleague. Both of whom are the dearest pet rescuers I’ve ever known. Neither of whom have ever farted on my lap. May they Rest In Peace knowing their legacies, and good manners, live on.
…
#PyleOfMemories is a series developed for #DementiaAwareness as a reminder to write the good stuff down before it’s lost forever. It will soon be a book to help fund #DementiaResearch. This is Chapter 2.
