Hey, Diary!
Big news today. I don’t have to rub the kittens’ behinds with the washcloth any more, ’cause they can pee and poop by themselves now, only I have to wash them and change the towels a lot more often, and Mom says she’s spending twice as much money for laundry soap now, but she was smiling when she said it, so I know she was only kidding me. Mr. Harding says that it won’t be too long before we can give them a kitty litter pan, except that we can’t use real kitty litter yet because they might eat it, so I’ll have to save our newspapers and tear them up real fine to use instead.
They’re starting to walk, too. I think they can see better, and they even play with each other a little bit, sort of rolling around like fighting, only gently, and when I pick them up, they act like they know me.
Brittany and Emily came over to see them this morning, and I let them each feed one, Jesse and Thomas. I fed Veronica myself because she’s going to be mine, and Smudgie too, because she needs extra care. She still doesn’t seem to want to eat as much as the others, and I have to coax her and pet her a lot, and even then she almost never finishes her bottle. I guess that’s why she’s so small.
They’re pretty wiggly now, but they settle down once they’ve got the nipples in their mouths. Brittany wanted to turn Jesse over and hold her like a doll, but I said no, just in case she might get milk in her lungs, even though now that she’s older there isn’t so much chance of that. Brittany acted like she was mad at me for a couple of minutes. I don’t understand that. After all, they’re my kittens, and I’m the one who knows best how to take care of them. I wouldn’t go to her house and tell her what to do, or act snotty if she didn’t let me do whatever I wanted to.
After lunch I heard a car drive up outside and stop in front of Mr. Harding’s house. It was a taxi cab, because that’s how Mr. Harding gets his groceries. Someone delivers them from the store downtown because he can’t walk that far and doesn’t drive. Every so often a little car comes that says “Medicine Dropper” on the side, and I think it’s from Cochrane’s Pharmacy, so he must have to take some kind of medicine, too. I wonder if he’s sick.
I waited a while until I figured he had time to put everything away, and then went outside and looked around the end of the fence to see if he was sitting on his front porch, and he was. He doesn’t come over as often as he did when the kittens were really little, ’cause he says it’s just too hard going up and down stairs, so I go to his house, just to talk. He always asks how they are, and I think he likes it that I go over to visit him almost every afternoon, and sometimes after supper, too. Maybe he even waits for me to come.
It’s hard to remember when I thought he was mean.
Mr. Harding knows a lot of stuff. He was born before World War Two, which is really amazing. I didn’t know there was anybody still alive who remembers things that are in history books. He even saw President Roosevelt once - in person I mean, not on television, ’cause they didn’t have television sets then - when he was on a school trip to Washington in nineteen thirty-six. My Mom and Dad weren’t even born then.
I wanted to know why he decided to be a vet, and he told me it was so he could help people who lived on farms to take care of their cows and horses and sheep and stuff, ’cause it was really hard to make a living back before the war, and without healthy animals to give milk and for wool and meat to sell, the farmers would starve. Only by the time he was ready to go to college to be a vet, the war was on and he had to go fight overseas. He joined the Royal Air Force in England and flew fighter planes.
I have to remember to tell Jimmy that.
Mr. Harding told me all about going to Guelph University in Ontario after the war, and about coming back to Nova Scotia to start his business, and how he took care of people’s pets as well as farm animals, and he did that for a long time. He doesn’t say much about the war, though, just that he was in it. I think talking about it makes him unhappy. Once he said that most of his friends didn’t come back from overseas, which I think means they got killed.
This afternoon I asked him what it was like to shoot at other airplanes, and he tried to change the subject, but I kept after him. He told me that he hated having to fight, because the pilots in the German planes were people too, somebody’s sons and brothers and husbands who were just trying to survive, like him. So I asked him why he did it, and he said, “‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’”
I asked him what that meant, and he told me, “A very wise man named Edmund Burke said that. It means that it’s every individual person’s responsibility to try to fix whatever’s wrong with the world, just like you did when the college students abandoned Maggie and you made a home for her so she could give birth to her kittens in a safe place. The war was evil too, and we had to do something to stop it, even if it meant shooting at the soldiers on the other side.”
I guess I was quiet for a while, thinking about what he said, because he asked me, “Something bothering you?”
“I was just wondering,” I said. Then, “Never mind.”
“Why won’t you tell me?”
“Because it’ll sound rude.”
“Try me.”
“Okay. If it’s so important to try to make things right when other people do something that’s wrong, how come you told Jimmy and me not to feed Maggie?”
I felt bad as soon as I said it, because I knew it made him unhappy. I could tell from the way he looked at me.
“Hanna,” he said, “everybody makes lots of mistakes in their lives. That was one of mine, and I wish I could take it back.”
“I’m not mad at you or anything.”
“I’m glad. Anyway, I tried to make up for it by showing you how to take care of the kittens.”
“Why did you do that, anyway? You acted at first as if you didn’t care.”
He didn’t answer me right away, just stared out toward the dykes as if he was remembering something that happened a long time ago. Finally he said, “I think I stopped caring when things happened in my life that I couldn’t do anything about. I found out that no matter how much you care, you can’t always stop people from dying. I’m not sure how to explain to you how I felt. It was self-pity, I guess.”
I knew he must be talking about his wife when she had cancer, and then the crash that killed his children and grandchildren. “So what made you change your mind?”
“You reminded me of my son when he was your age. He was a reformer too, out to save every stray cat or dog that wandered by. He once even brought home an injured bird perched on his finger. It wasn’t the least bit afraid of him. He used to capture tadpoles from the pond in the meadow behind our house and put them in the goldfish tank until they became frogs, and then he’d return them to the pond.” He laughed a little. “One year he waited too long, and we had frogs hopping all over the house.”
I laughed at that, but he looked kind of sad, remembering, and I scootched over close to him. We just sat there for a while, and I was happy. I have two best friends now, Jimmy and Mr. Harding.