26 - Sunday, August 28, 1994 - North Shore News ~A cat’s guide to surviva THE VINTAGE YEARS MY DAUGHTER’S cat is suffering from stress, and has a personal vet- erinarian who makes house calls. It’s home is a West End apartment, you see, where stress is perhaps endemic. The cat’s fresh-air experience is perforce all confined to the bal- cony, which provides the best protection both from street traffic and possible anti-feline responses from the neighbours. It is far from being choice cat country. The veterinarian, whose vis- its are not cheap, has deter- mined that in addition to para- noija and sinus trouble, the cat has pyorthea, so its teeth must be cleaned regularly, be given - penicillin shots and have its toenails tended. Cats being what they are, with the temperaments of divas, one is astonished at this one allowing such intimate grooming. Cats were always part of the domestic scene when I was growing up, but they looked after themselves very well and wouldn't have tolerated such human interfer- ence except for some hapless encounter with tar, say, or paint. There have been cats since the Pharaohs and evoluting isn't their bag. Up to now. I've been wondering if the cat’s acquiescence has anything to do with what's happening to us humans and the air we now breathe. We have big bunches of air over here on the North Shore, and we revel in our distance. from the fogs and smogs we see across the harbor. We go for long walks and take big gulps of the stuff. | think we may have to change some of that. When my hus- band and I moved at the end of April last, we moved from floor 10 to floor two, which Jost us a superb view of Vancouver and environs but afforded us more space, includ- ing deck space, and longer enjoyment of sunshine. It also brought us closer to the street. We look on Keith Road, the park part where it meets Lonsdale. It’s a lovely outlook, and my kitchen win- dows entertain me all day with park activity — walkers, squir- rels, crows, kids throwing balls, sunbathers. (Really! They still do it.) It also includes a very well- used thoroughfare. Buses rush past, trucks and vans, fast cars and noisy motorcycles. It’s rarely empty, even though we've only got the east-borne traffic on our up-side of the boulevard. There are trees between me and the traffic, but they’re young yet, and still spindly in the ieg. They don’t biock any of the panoramic activity. Certainly they don’t block the dirt. And let me say, this dirt is not just dusty stuff. It’s not the kind that just brushes off, that you can just blow away. This is greasy dirt, gummy dirt, that comes in and settles down on everything in the place. The window-sills — one can’t just wipe them off, they must be soaped and scrubbed; the lids of canisters on the counter, the utensils hanging on the wail, the counters them- selves. It’s appalling. It has to come f% of One complimentary . dinner entree when a second dinner entree of equal or greater value is purchased. $ 395 E 2 eggs, granary toast, panfiies, bacon 8 fresh fruit T LUNCH Specie eating a new $595 i kind of health burger with salad/sandwich with soup, ako EVERY TUESDAY LUNCH FISH & CHIPS. i DINNER -Use this coupon and fry a new Korean BBQ dish or M one of our standard entrees. -closed Sunday/Monday at 4:00 pm. 7 $30) Jalid after 5:00. *.- Excludes beverages”: ENSED i. 3135 Edgemont Bivd., N. Van. 980-5535 ama from afl those cars, all those exhausts, and when you think of what's happening to our intemal equipment! We're breathing that stuff all the time! That's where the cat and the evoluting come in. Because we too are going to have to re-do for sheer survival. But mean- while, all this mess is falling on me, and ipso facto.on you, my dear, and we're not just breathing it — we're wearing it and it’s clinging to our hair and our skin and our books and our pictures and where's the sotu- tion? Do we put all the traffic underground, or do we build all the houses on three-storey stilts? Or do we all wear gas- masks until our interiors have leatherized? Filling our rooms with house-plants is mooted to be of help, but they'd better be the shiny-leafed kind that will endure a daily wipe-off, until the necessary genius invents the alternative to the internal combustion machine. Men of vision like Henry Ford had a bad case of astig- matism actually. It was not in their design that we should kill ourselves with carbon deposits. They were simply looking at moving us from here to there. We took it to extremes, which seems to be a human prerogative, and like the cat we need a higher intelligence to help us extricate ourselves. 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