Benjamin Button Bon Voyage (juxtaposition)

Best Experienced With:    Blues Traveler;     Conquer Me

(Please right click on the link below to open the suggested background music to this evening’s celebration of the last group to make their way through Chez Mulligan foster kitten training, doing all the homework and passing all the tests.    With the least appreciated song ever set out there by John Popper and the rest of the thinner peeps from Blues Traveler)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAQhoxpPdKo

All six of the Ingalls foster kitten litter now have wonderful new, permanent houses.  I like to picture them bounding around their new homes, astounding their new owners/housemates by speaking French in complete sentences and helping the neighborhood children with their Calculus homework.  Am certain that at least one of the kittens will figure out the cure for cancer in the next few years so feel free to take up smoking again or roll around in asbestos whenever the urge compels you to roll around in insulation.   This group was a very special group.

We’ll celebrate the Ingalls litter’s time in The LJ in reverse order, listening to John Popper’s harmonica, with various phrases from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories.   That’s why we’re going to look at them in reverse age.     Because of the Benjamin Button thing.

Always start with the end in mind.           That’s a damn fine rule in business and in life.

The End & Goodbyes

“Benjamin, we’re meant to lose the people we love. How else would we know how important they are to us?” 

“Your life is defined by its opportunities… even the ones you miss”

 

 

 

“I want to remember us just as we are now.”

 

 

 

  

(Ceeeeeeeeeatie is the finest surrogate cat mom in the galaxy)

“You can be mad as a mad dog at the way things went; you can swear and curse the fates – but when it comes to the end, you have to let go.”

 

 

 

The Middle

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“It’s a funny thing about comin’ home. Looks the same, smells the same, feels the same. You’ll realize what’s changed is you.”

 

 

 

 

“Along the way you bump into people who make a dent on your life. Some people get struck by lightning. Some are born to sit by a river. Some have an ear for music. Some are artists. Some swim the English Channel. Some know buttons. Some know Shakespeare. Some are mothers. And some people can dance.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Beginning

 

 

 

 

 

 

“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You stuck around and scrolled all the way to the bottom, eh?   Not much of that going on in today’s MTV, three minute span of attention, sound bite oriented, mile wide-inch deep world.   Bully for you!    Well done.    For your efforts, you get a quote from the finest book written in the past twenty years.   Not Fitzgerald because he died in 1940:  Rick Bragg…from The Prince of Frogtown.    That’s one hell of a book.   Go order it right now and read it straight through.   It will make you laugh and cry.   That’s the definition of “one hell of a book” and it also describes fostering.

 

“Don’t worry about what people think, because once it’s all over the people who love you will make you what they want you to be, and the people who don’t love you will, too.”   (Rick Bragg:  “The Prince of Frogtown”) 

 

 

God bless Friends of County Animal Shelters for saving hundreds of dogs and cats from the gas chamber each year.     Screw you morons who choose to not spay or neuter your pets and then dump them at the shelter in cardboard boxes.  Please spay or neuter your pets.   Always read the fine print.   Floss every day.   Never turn left across four lanes of traffic.    Never start a land war in Southeast Asia.    Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself.    Rinse.   Repeat.