I recognize that my previous post was a bit of a rant, but, I can assure you, dear reader, that had it written it immediately after the event, it would have been positively vitriolic, even by my standards. As it was, it still took three complete re-writes (from scratch) before I thought it down to PG-13 level.
To help soften things up a bit, I thought I’d tell this tale of a fuzzy little kitten, named Sawyer.
Sawyer is a stuffed cat. Not a stuffed previously-live cat, but a stuffed toy cat. He is a fluffy white toy given to my daughter when she was very young by a friend. The cat is very soft and droopy. it’s also permanently positioned in a reclining, lying-on-the-side resting repose. It looks, for all the world, like a dead cat lying along the side of the road.
I named him Sawyer long before Michelle could talk. Someday, I suppose, she’ll get the Tom Sawyer reference. The name has stuck, but quite often she just calls it, “kitty.” That could be a genetic throw-back to my dad, who named every cat we had some variation of “puss” or “kitty”.
We left the hotel for the beach and, with a little persuading, got the kids to leave their toys behind in the room. They’d no doubt get lost or destroyed at the beach.
Later that day, when we returned, nobody really noticed that Sawyer was gone.
The next morning; however, Michelle was in fits being unable to find the cat. We searched the room with no luck. All the other stuffed animals that had been in the same place were still there, so we concluded that Michelle had taken Sawyer the car in the afternoon/evening. The car was parked in a garage across the street and as we were getting packed up to leave, I headed across to search the car. Sawyer wasn’t there.
I knew a storm would be brewing. Michelle can be very emotional about such things and Sawyer would be her first lost “major” stuffed toy.
I stopped by the front desk, working on the slightest possible chance that she’d dropped Sawyer in a hallway or the elevators, and, to their credit, they made a bit of a production out of checking with their housekeeping and such. They checked their logs and asked around, but alas, Sawyer was gone.
Michelle freaked out. We did our best to convince her that everyone was doing everything they could to find Sawyer, but we knew in our hearts he was gone. We knew that she must have dropped him somewhere, but she continued to insist that she’d left Sawyer in the room and that someone had taken him.
We explained that the only people in the room would have been housekeeping, and they wouldn’t take Sawyer. There were other stuffed animals and even electronic equipment in the room. If they’d been thieves, they wouldn’t have taken Sawyer.
As we were preparing to leave, the head of housekeeping called our room. They had found a white cat, that had been scooped with all the white comforters, sheets and towels the day before and it was found as it was being prepared for the laundry.
Yes, it was Sawyer, and Michelle was overjoyed to have her kitty back.
And that is the heartwarming tale of Sawyer the cat and the staff of the Omni, who get a lot of points in my book for saving a little girl’s fuzzy kitten.
