Dad Starts Work at the Sanctuary
I’m writing this from the future on 2/20/2021 so I’m not sure of the day that my father came to work at the sanctuary, but I do know it was in 1996 and probably in the spring or summer because I’d been at Home Depot in the garden section and had been envying the new rubber ponds that were made to put in gardens along with little waterfalls for effect. Mom was working for Gulf Controls and Dad had recently closed up his furniture store on the corner of Rome and Waters Av. For years he had been buying the seconds at Royal Creations and turning them into salable products. I know he was doing this as far back as 1980 because he had set me up with my own inventory and a box truck to set up displays on vacant gas station lots around town. I was hauling 90 pound book cases and entertainment centers in and out of the truck right up until the time I went into labor with Jamie.
As I write now I don’t remember why he closed the shop. It had been a pretty good business that he had run from flea markets and then the store front, from the traffic I saw when I’d help out. Every day he would carry the desks, end tables, and other merchandise out to the parking lot in front, with huge signs you could easily read driving by. $15 for a desk. $45 for an entertainment center and free delivery and set up at your home. He sold a lot, but maybe there just wasn’t enough of these small ticket items to pay the rent? I don’t know. At any rate, he was at home and despite being able to fix anything from a broken toaster to an airplane engine, he had never fed himself. My mother always buttered his bread and waited on him hand and foot when it came to domestic issues.
She called me one day and said, “You have to find something for your father to do! He’s driving me crazy! He calls me at work every two minutes because he doesn’t know how to operate the microwave to make popcorn, or he can’t find the TV remote.” I asked Dad to come out to the sanctuary and told him that I had seen these ponds at Home Depot and wondered if he could create a little outdoor garden area with one for one of the cats in the Bengal barn. He loved working outside and always had a green thumb, so he was made for this kind of task.
Back then we had a 12 x 60 foot mobile home that we had converted into several indoor rooms for Bengal cats, domestic cats and hybrids. It was an eyesore and the very first thing people saw to the right as they entered our front gate. In order for the cats to have some time out in the sunshine I had already built a long, narrow row of cages at window level on the outside of trailer with pet doors so the cats could go out onto their little catios or be inside in their rooms. These were only about two feet deep and three feet high, but ran the length of the trailer. I told Dad that I wanted to create an outdoor cage that ran the full 60 feet but that would be about 15 feet deep and go all the way from the top of the windows to the ground. In that ground space I wanted a waterfall and pond and lots of landscaping so that it was a great place to be a cat. These cats were anywhere from 8 to 15 pounds each.
He leaped into the task and at the beginning of the next day he said, “What do you want me to do now?” I was shocked and delighted to see the transformation he had made for the first cat to have this huge space, so I said, “How about a second pond?” The next day, he had replicated the work for the second cat in line. The same happened for the third day. On the fourth day, when he said, “What do you want me to do now?” I said, “I’d like to get all of the big cats off concrete and onto soft earth.”
I gave him the requirements for cage wire strength, minimum cage sizes which we already exceeded by 4 to 10 times, and told him other than that he should just surprise me. He worked six days a week and was always out in the yard building cages when I woke up at 7:30 and was usually
