There’s been high demand among the Ex Fabula faithful for a chance to talk about pets! Season 16 kicked off at Sugar Maple with tellers sharing what they’ve done with, for and because of their cats, rats, dogs, cockatiels and gerbils.

Usually, we get a pet, then name it. Not Dana and her husband. They were charmed by a grocery store commercial they saw when they moved to Australia. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver was in a garden surrounded by happy worms and pollinators he kept calling his “Little mates”. They wanted to have a “Little Mate”, so they got a cat. 

The jaunty accent that made them want a pet led to a conversation with the landlord at their new apartment complex that went in circles. The manager told them “no pits”. After a long exchange, Dana realized the policy was no pets, not no stone fruits. It was too late. Dana and her husband decided to break this rule and came up with elaborate routines to hide Little Mate. They were almost found out when the complex went up for sale and there were showings, but the sale went through and the manager they’d fooled (or didn’t?) never said anything.

Christine wouldn’t get her daughter a dog till she’d learned how to care for a “practice pet”. Rats weren’t what Christine had in mind – not at all! But three rat sisters at the Humane Society named Dorothy, Blanche and Rose (the power of names!) changed her mind. She and her daughter found themselves becoming humble servants to these intelligent and social creatures.

They built cages and auxiliary play spaces and paper towel tube tunnels and learned to live with escapes too. Her daughter was in middle school then and spent hours in her room with them. When their mortal spans came to an end, they slept in her daughter’s armpits. Christine thinks these rats taught her daughter a tolerance for gross mammals of all kinds – a quality that serves her in her adult job in Washington DC working with congress.

Anja related some interesting experiences she had with Laughter Yoga and another movement practice called Interplay. She was a 23-year-old in Kansas City with time (maybe too much) on her hands thanks to the collapse of job opportunities in the Great Recession. She nearly became the human pet of a much older Interplay instructor who decided Anja’s skills of uninhibited self-expression outstripped hers by far. Once when this mentor/disciple left town, she trusted Anja to house sit and watch her cat, Charley. Charley went out the patio door and didn’t come back…oops.

Nikki told us how she’s alive today, thanks to Ian, her parents’ mutt! Her mother was pregnant with her when the always-fighting neighbors took it up a notch and ignited a pile of clothes in their closet. The fire spread and Ian the dog alerted her parents and got them to escape before it was too late.

Sheila is the consummate “cat whisperer”. She has a particular love for Siamese cats. She was about halfway through an awful divorce in 2013 when she fell in love with a Siamese cat named Coco. She bought a deluxe, soft-sided cat carrier and beamed with joy as she loaded Coco up to bring her home from the Humane Society.

Sheila double parked when she got to her apartment, because she had lots of stuff to unload. Imagine her horror when she came back for the new carrier and found that Coco had bolted! How could this happen to Sheila, a responsible animal rescuer? Sheila described the extreme lengths she went through to locate Coco – flyers, social media, neighborhood canvasses and the services of an animal communicator. Coco had been sighted all across the Southshore neighborhood. Sheila’s final effort was to set a live trap with a bowl of tuna in her apartment garage. The next day Sheila woke up to Coco in the trap! 

Jane reflected on how things can change overnight. One year she spent Labor Day weekend backpacking with her sister, feeling strong and free. She kept a doctor’s appointment immediately after and walked out of the office with a diagnosis: Jane had cancer. In the space of one year, she went through three surgeries, chemo and radiation treatments.

Like Sheila and Christine, Jane found a love-at-first sight at the Humane Society. A one-eyed Skye terrier-Maltese-Shih Tzu mash-up became her guardian and companion during her medical ordeals. “Scout” walked several perimeters every day to protect her from squirrels and other threats.

One day Scout faltered when she took him to a nearby pond to run with her Labradors. A cardiologist discovered that Scout’s physical heart was too small for his body. One day on a frozen lake, Scout broke his hip on the ice. Jane only had Scout with her for two years, but his giant, undersized heart broke hers wide open to make room for more life and more love. 

Pets have always been part of Kevin’s life. He adopted a gerbil named Ed – a survivor of a cousin’s diet-comparison science experiment. With Kevin, Ed’s diet expanded to include cardboard tubes from towels and toilet tissue. Ed died in Kevin’s hands when his time was up, and he was buried in the backyard. A cockatiel named Birdie shared his life too. Birdie wasn’t confined and would land on lamps and visitor’s heads, and eventually escaped. When Kevin went looking for Birdie, he eventually found him on top of a stranger’s head. 

Carol Hale had a sweet situation renting a little house in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Or so it seemed. Her landlady (who lived in New York) owned the house next door too. A Rottweiler with demonic eyes lived with the renter next door. The dog’s lunging and 24/7 barking drove Carol to extremes! First, she did reasonable things – like talking to the dog’s owner. She then called the landlady and asked her to talk to her tenant about the dog, the landlady told Carol to wear earplugs – so she did, but even that wasn’t enough. 

In an attempt to be heard, Carol called the landlady (without identifying herself) and let her hear the dog’s incessant barking. The landlady asked “who’s this?”, Carol hung up. Finally, Carol mixed some pills for human issues into a blob of hamburger and gave it to Demon Dog. The dog was fine and there was finally silence.

Finally, Dennis Oulahan described all the quirks and charms of Stella the English Bulldog. He was sure she had a little satellite dish somewhere in her head. She’d receive an invisible, inaudible signal and jump out of deep sleep to race around the room for what Dennis and his wife called a zoom session. This was genuine, otherworldly zooming – not a computer meetup! She respected no boundaries when she needed a face to lick or someone to scratch her ears. Dennis broke everyone’s heart when he described the illnesses that finally felled this spirit.

At the end of the night Dana was crowned champion of the “Pets” StorySlam for her funny and feel-good story about Little Mate. While I had no crown, I did share an ultrashort about the turtles who came to live with me 43 years ago. My last will and testament contains instructions since my turtles could outlive me. That usually isn’t the case; our pets are with us for a too-short time, and we have to make the adjustments in our routines and our hearts to live with them and then we say goodbye.