My Uncle John was a prominent physician in Lakewood, Ohio, practicing from the 1930s through the 1970s. His wife Ruth was a sociable woman who loved entertaining. One afternoon, she was hosting her girlfriends for a game of bridge. Minutes before their arrival, she went to fetch the clam dip from the kitchen counter and found their cat helping himself to a taste. She quickly shooed the cat out the back door, then stood there thinking long and hard about what to do with the dip. With a tinge of guilt, she smoothed it over with a knife and carried on.
Near the end of the party, she took the trash out the back door and found their cat dead on the stoop. She immediately called Uncle John, explained what had happened with the clam dip, and asked what to do. He told her they had no alternative — she and all the girls would need to meet him at St. John Hospital to have their stomachs pumped.
Ruth’s daughter always loved picturing it: twelve fancy ladies in their mink stoles filing into the emergency room, her father waiting for them on the other end.
Around dinnertime that evening, the neighbor knocked on that same back door. “I’m so sorry about your cat,” he said. Ruth, confused, asked him what he meant. “Well,” he said, “as I was leaving for an appointment, I found your cat out by the curb — he’d been hit by a car. I put him on your back stoop. I didn’t want to disturb your party.
Peace,
Tim McCarthy
