Bambi just read an interesting and informative article entitled “How to keep your pets calm in a big storm” by Mr. Aaron Beswick in the Sackville tribune:
https://www.sackvilletribunepost.com/news/regional/how-to-keep-your-pets-calm-in-a-big-storm-349425/
Without having any pet living under their roof, she can easily imagine that they would be made anxious by the noise of the wind, the feeling that a storm is passing by or even just approaching. Just like kids. Just like us.
Mr. Beswick’s article brought some childhood memories to her mind.
Made nervous by loud shelling noises, her neighbours’ dog used to run to the shelter with them. Sometimes he would scratch the floor for minutes in a row until they managed to calm him down.
As a child, Bambi used to take care of wild cats on the street, thinking to herself that, as humans, we are caring for each other, but who does care for them? That was before becoming allergic to cats later in life.
At one point in time, she was feeding and trying to nurture two adult cats and, eventually, their 7 kitten. She called the adult cats Nancy and Roy (imagining them to be siblings), only to discover a few months later that Roy was pregnant– almost at the same time as Nancy (mmm—Clearly then, Roy was not a male cat. Silly Bambi ?). Eventually, all these cats died at once (but that was a different story).
Another cute cat sadly lost an eye and a tail during a round of shelling and a bomb explosion respectively. He (she?) remained alive and even reproduced, after learning to run to a shelter so fast, even before the (human) neighbours.
Bambi was serious about helping those cats to the point of throwing food to them from the balcony. After her parents risked their lives to do groceries, Bambi did something stupid: Her mom opened the fridge a few hours after returning home. To her horror, she didn’t find neither the freshly bought ham nor the cheese. Why? Well, Bambi threw all the food to the street cats from the balcony!
Another time, and this was a freaky memory, she and her family were escaping to the Beirut airport. They were driving fast under snipers’ shooting, along with shelling here and there. Bambi’s dad asked his kids to lower their heads whilst driving fast on that particularly dangerous highway. It was like a movie scene… Bambi, the youngest child, saw an injured cat and started to beg her dad to save her. Her loving dad stepped out of the car fast to help the cat. She learned years after the truth about this cat: Her dad found it already dead (likely injured by a driver saving his/her life). He pushed the unlucky cat to the side of the road and returned running to the car. He told Bambi: “She will be fine there; her mom will take care of her”. Bambi’s own mom was not impressed by her spouse’s (risky) behaviour. Perhaps this is what parents do, out of love, to try to bring a glimpse of normality and humanity into absurdly violent situations?
Many years after this incident, when Bambi was 24 (= last year ?; that was a joke), she made a trip to the Middle East to visit. Her parents invited her to (the island of) Cyprus for a weekend; Cyprus is 20 minutes away from Lebanon by airplane. A weird experience happened there: Just like a dog, Bambi felt an earthquake coming a few seconds before it occurred. Her parents thought that their youngest daughter was being weird by sharing that she feels something big about to happen. She warned them twice about it. Indeed, a few seconds later, a major earthquake took place in Turkey ☹. Bambi’s hotel room had tiny damage in its walls. This is how big that earthquake was (90 people died and about 240 others were injured).
Bambi does not pretend to have any psychological explanation to the strange story above. She admits that she is a deer. Perhaps for a few seconds, she had been a sensitive dog.
