Carol Garnier Dutra's Blog: Love Is Not Having To Say You're Sorry...

Love Story, a movie staring Ryan O’Neal and Allie McGraw made back about twenty five years ago, was based on those eight little words; love is not having to say you're sorry.

Is that what love is about?

My husband and I knew an older woman who lived in our neighborhood, in San Jose, who kept 20 feral cats in her garage and back yard. Because she passed away many years ago I will use her real name, which was Gertrude Bold.
I am sure that Mrs. Bold loved her cats because she gave them all a home, and she fed them, which was not a cheap task to accomplish even back when all of this went on.

Mrs. Bold loved her 20 cats but she didn’t have her cats vaccinated against common cat illnesses, and as far as anyone knew she never took any of her cats to a veterinarian, which everyone in the neighborhood figured was because she couldn’t afford to do this.

Mrs. Bold’s cats used her back yard as their litter box.

In the warm summer months it became a real nuisance to go outside, and smell the stink these cats made. I found this situation disturbing because all the cats I have known in my life have been ‘clean’ to the point that they wouldn’t defecate, and just leave it in the open, but Mrs. Bold’s cats followed this behavior.
But still we know that Mrs. Bold loved her cats; that was why she kept them all…in her yard and in her garage.

One day Mrs. Bold’s cats started to die off from an illness. The neighbors, my husband and I began to see dead cats here and there around the neighborhood. It was very upsetting because we didn’t know why Mrs. Bold’s cats were dying off!
As far as I know, no one approached Mrs. Bold to ask if she knew that her cats were dying off. We all knew that she loved her cats; this was why no one in the neighborhood complained about the 20 feral cats Gertrude kept in her backyard, and in her garage.

I managed to capture one of Gertrude Bold’s ill cats, a large ginger tom my husband and I called Thomas O’Malley, which was the name we gave to him whenever we would see him traveling around the neighborhood. Thomas O’Malley seemed to be the leader of the pack of feral cats, and because he appeared to be the ‘lead’ cat, my husband and I called him Father O’Malley at times because his behavior was like that of a father, both a cat father and a father, in the religious sense.
On the other hand there were times when we would say; “There goes Officer O’Malley”, because Thomas, at times, seemed to be a cat police officer, mediating squabbles between the members of the gang of feral cats that lived in Mrs. Bold’s back yard and in her garage.

I took Thomas O’Malley to our veterinarian at the time, a Dr. Anderson who used to have his practice in a small building down the street from San Jose High School. Dr. Anderson ran some tests on Thomas O’Malley, and he found that Thomas was suffering from feline leukemia. So we were sure that since Thomas had leukemia that the other feral, neighborhood cats that Gertrude. Bold cared for, in her garage and in her back yard, must have been dying off from the same illness.

Dr. Anderson was a very kind doctor; he tried to save Thomas O'Malley but it was too late. Thomas O’Malley died from the feline leukemia.

My husband and I really didn’t know Thomas O’Malley, he never lived with us, he was a neighborhood feral cat who lived in Gertrud Bold's back yard, and in her garage, but we could see from looking at Thomas that he was ill. We tried to help him. I guess this was a form of love on our part to care for this cat, when he wasn’t our cat.