I received a series of urgent texts from my girlfriend at 10:52 Wednesday night.
“Bro ***** just called ******”
“To tell her about a stray cat outside the library and how she should come get it”
Besides her “bro”-ing me and the heinous lack of punctuation (English majors up), I was obviously very intrigued by this mysterious library cat that her roommates had captured.
While a normal person would probably be asleep, doing homework or relaxing, I was at the gym having a loud, obnoxious conversation with a friend from home, so, obviously, I was pre-occupied.
After I finished my conversation and made dinner, I poured some milk into a small container and marched myself over to Townhouse 21.
I called her and basically demanded to be let in to see Friedsam Memorial’s guest of honor. While she seemed less than enthusiastic about her new roommate, I adore cats (despite a horrible allergy that I willingly put aside because duh) and could not wait to meet the new addition.
Enter, cat.
I walked into her living room to see a very skinny, very mangy Russian blue cat. The cat, who my girlfriend and her two roommates assumed was a girl, met my gaze with bright yellow eyes. She was very nervous but seemed friendly. It quickly became obvious that while they might have been under the impression that they had gained a new, fuzzy roommate, someone had clearly lost a family member. This was no feral cat; this was someone’s pet.
She wolfed down some tuna and drank almost all the milk and water we gave her. She really liked us after that!
She began to warm up to me, and as I started to pet her, I noticed some bumps behind her ears and around her head and neck. I thought maybe it was fleas but discovered the poor baby was covered in ticks. So, began the tough task of removing as many as we could while simultaneously wondering about her owners and making plans to bring our new friend to the local vet.
And so, the mysterious library cat was dubbed Lyme.
When they first grabbed the cat, my girlfriend posted to a local lost pets Facebook page to see if she could possibly find an owner. Around 12:30 a.m., someone responded, commenting, “That’s my cat! He’s been lost since July!” We all looked at each other and a chorus of “She’s a he?” erupted.
Lyme was not, in fact, “Lyme,” or even a girl, for that matter, but rather Dojo. As sketchy as it seemed, we piled into a car and went on a hunt to find Dojo/Lyme’s owner. We pulled in the driveway and a woman came outside to greet us, obviously emotional and ecstatic that we had found her cat. She explained that she had been in the hospital and Dojo, an indoor-outdoor cat, had stopped coming while she was away from home. She had figured she had seen her beloved cat for the last time, but then we, a rag-tag group of college girls looking equally as mangy as Dojo, showed up at her door at 12:30 a.m. on a Thursday.
A cat, no matter how mangy, how lyme-y or how feral, can change your life. Or it can at least be redeemable for some good ju-ju.