Hysterical Journey to Historic Places


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April 30th 2018
Published: April 30th 2018
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<em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">SILENT NIGHT, SNOWY NIGHT, WHAT A NIGHT

Being the factual account of how Holiday the Cat attended the birth in one of her previous lives of our Lord and savior, Jesus H. Christ.

As related to Frank S. Oliver in December, 1986.

We all know, of course, that God endows all cats with nine lives instead of just one like everybody else gets. He did that for the perfectly good reason that cats are superior creatures. They do not necessarily have to live out their full allotment of nine lives one right after the other. Depending on their sensibilities cats are allowed to reenter the world of the living at their leisure. This allows them to live for tens of years, or hundreds of years or even thousands of years. It also affords them a vast firsthand knowledge of ancient customs, languages, peoples and events. That level of learning is what makes them superior. Unless they are so inclined to do so cats seldom confide in humans. For the most part we are dull and unworthy of their attention. This is especially so in cats who are as worldly and cultured and so full of wisdom and good humor as my friend Holiday the Cat is. Why she has favored me as her spokesman she has not chosen to disclose, but I fell honored by her trust in me and am proud of our friendship.

She speaks fondly of her days as a midwife in the town of Bethlehem before steel was made there, and of some acquaintances from the nearby town of Nazareth before either town came to be part of Pennsylvania. Back in those days the whole Lehigh Valley was caught up in the throes of a bad economic recession. Unemployment was the common thing. Taxes were high. Due to high interest rates money was in scarce supply. What money was to be had was in large part consumed by inflation. The Democrats were in office so the economy was not expected to recover anytime soon. In order to supplement her income as a midwife, which never paid well anyway, not even in flush times, Holiday the Cat took a second job as a nightwatchman at the Holiday Inn of Bethlehem off of Route 512 out near the airport. Hotel jobs do not pay well either but she seldom went hungry because there plenty of mice scampering around in the kitchen. They were nice and fat, easy to catch, and during slow times at work she caught enough to spirit away from the property hidden in her lunch pail. She shared the bounty at home later with friends less fortunate than herself. Her boss would have fired her on the spot for pilfering the mice out of the kitchen, but he never caught her. He was a real stinker, loud and fat, and recently divorced. Nobody liked him much. He always overcharged his guests for everything, and underpaid his help. One of Holiday the Cat’s friends who she shared the stolen mice with was an unemployed carpenter named Joseph who lived with his pregnant wife, Mary, up in Nazareth.

At first glance Joseph was kind of a scruffy looking fellow. He somehow always needed a haircut and a shave, his clothes were all raggedy looking and worn out, and they didn’t ever fit very well. He rode around in a beat up old blue pickup truck that burned oil and needed a valve job, the belts squealed, the brakes were mushy, and the tires were bald. Nevertheless Joseph was generally well thought of around town. He worked hard when he had work, was forthright, honest and fair in his dealings with others. He was kind to animals, thrifty with a dollar, did not use tobacco, or get drunk and disorderly often. He had even teeth, clear eyes, a broad and engaging grin, and he cared deeply for Mary even though the child she carried was not his own. As the pregnancy advanced this fact became a matter of concern to Joseph, small town gossips being the way they are.

As Thanksgiving Day came and passed the gossip grew snide and ugly. Grocery store clerks snickered behind his back. Down at the employment office fellow out-of-work union brothers lowered their voices and averted their glances whenever he drew near. In the tavern there was open laughter. By the third week in December Joseph had grown sullen and weary of it all and he decided to load his tools and the baby stuff into his old blue pickup and take Mary down to Bethlehem for a visit with his best and truest remaining friend, Holiday the Cat. By mid-afternoon on December 24th Joseph helped Mary into the truck and they headed south out of town. The journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem is only about 8 miles, but this is when Joseph’s luck began to sour in earnest. The wind shifted around to the south and the barometer began to plummet. As the wind freshened the temperature began to drop. The first snowflakes began to fall and soon after they were in the midst of a howling blizzard. Traffic slowed and of course neither the heater nor the wipers in the old truck would work. They hadn’t for several months. Just as the first of Mary’s labor pains had subsided the left rear tire blew out. Joseph had overloaded the truck with all of their stuff. They were stranded on the outskirts of Bethlehem because the tire could not be changed. Joseph had been forced to sell his spare tire and jack to a money lender.

Under normal circumstances their situation would have greatly amused Mary. She was accustomed to hardship and discomfort because her life had never been soft. Mary was the daughter of Irish immigrants. She had flaming red hair and her sparkling blue eyes fairly twinkled with mirth just as though she held some great secret. She was an exceptionally large framed woman who had a hearty laugh and a ready hand. Mary could neither read, nor could she write her own name, and simple sums were quite beyond her. Her warmth and friendliness were such that none of the local merchants ever tried to take advantage of her as they sometimes did with Joseph, who felt that it was almost as if she had her own guardian angel to look after her and protect her from adversity. Mary just smiled and credited her good fortune to divine intervention. Just as things looked their grim darkest Mary could smile and then almost magically their outlook would brighten and soon their troubles would disappear.

Sitting out there in the blizzard in that old wreck of a truck and with the birth of their child almost imminent did not seem at all funny to Joseph. He looked over at his wife, sorrow in his eyes, and saw that she was smiling at him, and then she began to chuckle a little bit. Pretty soon they were both laughing, and then laughing and crying, and then, lo and behold, the wind died down, the snow stopped falling, the sun came back out, and the birds started in singing merrily in the trees. That is the way things always were with Mary.

Before too many more minutes went by an old Ammish farmer appeared plodding towards them up the road. He was driving a handsome team of matched bays and leading a donkey behind his wagon. As he drew near the old gentleman, being a keen-eyed trader of long experience saw an opportunity to divest himself of the donkey without having to go clear in to the auction yard. Joseph had nothing to match the value of the team and wagon but he worked a trade for the donkey. The poor old beast wasn’t worth much, he was, in fact, on his way to the glue factory but didn’t know it of course. Mary climbed up onto the donkey and they once again started off towards town with Joseph breaking trail and leading the donkey. Before long it became apparent to Joseph that the donkey was blind, and soon Mary discovered that he was infested with barn lice. If this was divine intervention, then Joseph knew better than to question it. Mary was a stout woman, but not stout enough to ride on that donkey for very long in her advanced condition. Shortly Mary led the donkey and Joseph rode. Mostly nobody wanted to ride the donkey because of the lice. It worked out best when one of them broke trail and the other led the donkey. Struggling along that way they finally reached town. They were cold, hungry, tired, and heartily sick of the donkey, and the donkey was sick of them. Mary had been softly moaning with each step she took and her contractions had been coming harder and with more and more frequency. Her time was drawing very near when they arrived at the Holiday Inn off of Route 512 near the airport. As Joseph was hitching the deeply annoyed donkey to the flagpole in front of the hotel lobby Holiday the Cat’s hard hearted boss looked up from counting his small pile of filthy lucre and happened to see them. His solid opinion in the matter was that those two scruffy looking hippies out front were certainly up to nothing good, and they could have no commerce in his hotel. It was quite a high toned place now that the remodeling was done. Of course the roof still leaked in several places, but that was only an embarrassment during a good sluicing rain squall. “My goodness”, he thought as he gazed upon them with more intense scrutiny, “Those two looked capable of any sort of psychopathic deviation. That fat redhead looked onerous in particular”. The bossman thought of calling in the police, and then decided not to bother them on Christmas morning. They probably had their hands full with a jailhouse packed with rowdy drunks celebrating the season. He called up hotel security instead.

When the call came in on Holiday the Cat’s beeper to respond to a possible altercation in the lobby she had just finished a nice late snack, roast mouse with mustard and Swiss cheese on rye. She wiped the grease off her chin with her breakaway necktie, grabbed her flak vest, riot helmet, mace, five cell flashlight, and truncheon out of her locker and made for the scene of mayhem. She burst forth at full speed with her truncheon at the ready, assessed the situation and before she could stop herself had fetched a wicked blow to Joseph’s kneecap. There is not much that Holiday the Cat enjoys more than a good brisk clubbing on Christmas morning. It surely must have caused poor old tired Joseph grievous pain, but it earned her renewed favor with the bossman. He smiled benevolently at her and she was quick to seize the advantage. She told him that she would have these two lowlife troublemakers in the jug pronto and before he could respond she had Joseph in a thumb lock and was out the door. Soon as she had him safely out of sight around the corner she released her painful grip on Joseph’s sore thumb, apologized for the clubbing and gave Mary a fast examination. There was no time to lose. Fortunately Holiday the Cat’s home and office was in a drafty old barn just across the street next to a McDonalds restaurant. She hustled them inside, made Mary comfortable on a bale of hay in one of the stalls and then rushed upstairs into the loft to prepare a birthing room and heat up some water.

In the meantime they had forgotten about the blasted donkey so Joseph limped back across the highway to retrieve the wretched beast. In his excitement and haste Joseph had also forgotten that you approach a blind donkey from the rear at your own peril. Sure enough the donkey sensed a presence behind him, mistrusted it (for all he knew it was a cougar back there making ready to pounce) and reacted in the only way he could being tied to the flagpole. He leaned forward on his front legs, raised his rear end and kicked viciously backward with both hooves. Besides knocking Joseph momentarily senseless the kick broke four of his ribs and punctured a lung. The snow had begun to fall again, but Joseph’s only thoughts were of Mary and the child. He fought through the pain and gingerly stood up. It was slow work but he finally made it, doubled over in pain, gasping for every breath, and spitting up frothy blood, back to the barn with the blasted donkey. He put the donkey up in a stall fed him some oats and rubbed him down a little with a handful of dry hay. Of course they got back too late to be on hand for the birth of Mary’s child. He wheezed his way over and slumped down in the hay next to where Mary and child lay peacefully asleep. The infant was a fine strapping lad, hale and hearty in every respect, but tempered with Mary’s kindness and sweetness. He was just the sort of lad to attain greatness in future years.

Holiday the Cat was puttering around still, cleaning up, putting things away, and filling out the paperwork. She heard Joseph come in but did not turn around and look at him. When she came to the line that said “baby’s name” she asked Joseph what to write down. Being very nearly done in himself all Joseph could do was mutter a common epithet of the day. “Jesus Christ”, he said, and then fell sound asleep. When she came to the line that said “middle initial” Holiday the Cat looked around at the sleeping family, shrugged and wrote down her own initial “H”. Silent night, snowy night, what a night.

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