After selecting my future housemates and companions, my conversation with Honey Rothberg, DVM, and director of the Marlton Animal Hospital resulted in her suggesting both cats be spayed and de-clawed since they were to be strictly house cats. After seeing what my nephew’s two cats and their claws had done to his furniture, I was more than thankful for her advice.   This was sometime around November 27, 1997; I had to wait a week for them to recuperate from their surgery, before taking them home, and the sharing of our lives together. The spaying of these female felines would add, on average, about three years to their lives. So much for motherhood.

           For me, it was a long wait, I was anxious to take these little cats home with me and begin my fatherly duties. Finally, December 4, 1997 came. It was a day that gave my life an entirely new outlook; I became a father, a Mr. Mom. It was a date that I was to celebrate every year, although Frankie and Johnnie were oblivious of its meaning to me.

           I lost my wife Evelyn of 39 years, short of two weeks, May 8, 1997. That coming June, Evelyn would have been 84 years old, about 18 months older than me. She suffered a massive stroke and was in a coma for about three weeks. As a Jewish family observing the ritual of Shiva, the house was crowded with family and friends. Once Shiva was over everyone departed to their respective homes and doings. When I closed the door, I was faced for the first time in my life with a deep sense of loneliness and what I now understand was depression. It was bad enough during the eight and one-half years of her illness that we both had to suffer with her gradual dementia. But now, this loneliness was an experience foreign to me. More than once or twice, my self-pity took over and my eyes shed copious tears due to the fact Evelyn was no longer with me, except in my heart. Her touch was in every room in the house. I could not move from one room to the other without knowing that it reminded me of her presence. In that way, I guess the tears released some part of the unending hurt of living alone in a home that was once full of our shared life. We were never blessed with children. I realized I needed something to love, something or someone to need me. I did not want to go “the another woman route,” none could supplant Evelyn and what she meant to me. All our years together had programmed me to the extent that I needed something alive to love and have that love returned. Adopting a pet(s) was the obvious choice.

          On the way over to the Marlton Animal Hospital in New Jersey, I stopped and bought a pet carrier in which to take my future “children” home. Previously, I had inquired about their feeding habits and waste disposal methods. Food was prepared before I left the house and a litter box was filled with Scoop Away litter for their use.

         Arriving at the Marlton Animal Hospital, I signed the adoption papers, filling in their names as Frankie Weiss and Johnnie Weiss, and was given some instructions regarding their behavior once let out of the carrier into their new home.

          It was customary for the person adopting an animal to give a stipend of monetary value to the Hospital in an effort to help them carry on the work of saving many of these animals from almost certain tragic results. I gave them a check reflecting a generosity not usually received in their attempt to find these wonderful creatures homes. Over the years of my togetherness with Frankie and Johnnie, the check I wrote that fateful day could never repay for the comfort, pleasure and love these two felines have bestowed upon me. Although they would never replace Evelyn, their presence filled the house with a child-like quality I would have never thought possible for this new father of two five-month old beautiful and heart stealing felines.

          In being responsible for these little four legged creatures, they, in their mysterious way would be a solid factor in improving my health; my mind no longer would dwell on my loss. My entire outlook would change. Evelyn was gone. I now had the duty of responding to their every need. I was no longer alone. The house would be alive with their presence and antics and my unfamiliar duties as their Mr. Mom.

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