Post the Fourth: Wherein the Author Shames Himself before an Albino

My two small children spent three glorious days at their grandparents recently. Glorious for their parents, that is, who did not accompany them. I don't actually know how great a time they had and never really gave it a lot of thought, since I refuse to ask too many questions when I'm offered the treat of not having to cook for or dress small people for days at a time.

At any rate, the hour of their return was nigh, and I arrived at the agreed-upon halfway point at which the shorty re-up was to transpire. I welcomed my children with the sort of joyful embraces that a parent gives to their returning beloved offspring, especially when said parent has momentarily forgotten that their return means the end of uninterrupted sleep, conversation and even thought for the foreseeable future.

My children, for their part, seem pleased enough to see me, but were more anxious to get home to their kitten, separation from whom meant that they had had to be content with each other and their own head lice for animal companionship. There was a colossal pet shop nearby, and my girls wanted to celebrate their imminent inter-species reunion with a gift for their kitten, who in all likelihood would feign appreciation for her new toy mouse or whatever and then go back to de-upholstering our furniture. As the household was rather low on a number of pet sundries, and I knew that prices at this establishment had recently been slashed from outrageous to merely exorbitant, I agreed to have a look inside.

For those who have not been around a pet shop for a while, there are certain so-called improvements you should know about. It is now forbidden to make monkeys smoke, bears dance, or, in short, allow any of the creatures to have any fun at all. Presumably this is to make it easier for them to say goodbye when they leave for their new homes. After all, if the single malts flowed freely they'd probably never want to leave.  This sort of attitude when taken to its nanny state extreme often results in pet shops not selling puppies or kittens at all, since there's evidently something wrong with buying adorable helpless animals on a holiday shopping whim and then taking them for a very  long and disorienting walk in the country at the first sign that the cuteness is about to wear off.

Fortunately, this wasn't such an establishment. Not quite, anyway. It was entirely puppy free, but along the back wall there were a couple of well-fattened adult mogs behind glass, whom the pet shop owners (on behalf of a local animal charity) were offering for "adoption"--a sort of euphemistic sleight-of-hand, which, like the phrase "escort services," fools no one. A plaque beside their enclosure presented a message from the larger of the two felines, a portly two year old white and ginger male. The note was  written in first-person feline narration to achieve the sort of intimacy in style favoured by Salinger and Twain. "My owner could not longer care for my brother and me," it read, "and we have nowhere else to go. We have been through so much stress already, we really could not bear to be separated." So far, so Dickensian. "We require a good home with a loving owner"--and here was the part that grabbed my attention--"and I need to be an indoor-only cat, because my fair nose and ears mean I risk skin cancer if exposed to too much sunlight."

I read this last part aloud, because it was the reason I had given my own daughters for keeping our kitty inside. As I finished reading these words about sunlight, fair features and skin cancer, I turned around and noticed that my daughters were not within earshot, but a young albino boy was.

 I know I'm in no way to blame here. I was just reading a sign, and how often do you see albinos anyway? I really wish I were making this up, but unfortunately this is the sort of thing that happens to me all the time, because there is some sort of unwritten law that if you embarrass very easily then genuinely embarrassing things happen to you all the time. Evidently there was a memo I missed at some point informing me that Ricky Gervais would be a script consultant on my life. I've had my suspicions before, but now I know for sure, and I also know that somewhere in Melbourne's suburbs there's a young albino kid crying to his mother because he wanted to get a kitty, but all he got was insensitive comments from a middle-aged American man.

Maybe I'm the one they shouldn't let outside.