Jessy Delfino's Blog

Freeze Dried Pets

Here, Cisco listens to his favorite Huey Lewis and the News jam for ever.

Yesterday, I went to TriBeCa, one of the coolest parts of town to teach a ukulele lesson to these really cool artsy women who are, well, let's just say doing pretty well in life, who live in those huge fantasy lofts that are sorta unheard of nowadays unless you want to pay like, 10 gs a month on them, with those giant windows that drench everything with that golden yellow sunlight, brimming full of gorgeous antique furniture and objects d'art, like velvet couches and polished wardrobes and a freeze dried cat...wait, what?

Yes, you read correctly, freeze. dried. cat.

I noticed it when we first sat down but I refused to let my brain believe what I was seeing, so I just ignored it and chirped all smily about getting our ukes out and tuning them up. However, my eye line kept returning to the cozy kitty in an eternal sleeping position atop a table. Finally, my brain said, "Believe it, bitch" and I did. I actually stopped the lesson in a somewhat comical way, something like this...

"Now, you may find the Bb chord is kind of tricky at first, but with practice, your fingers will be able to easily find their way to it, and um, I'm sorry, but is that a dead cat on top of your table?"

My student stopped, smiled slightly and nodded her head lightly, as if she'd been asked that question a million times.

"Everyone always comments on the cat," she said, "but no one ever seems to care about the armadillo." I looked around the room for this armadillo, and found it way up high on top of a 14 foot tall china cabinet, turned around so you could only see part of it. Hey, maybe if Armi the armadillo was curled up into a bowl shape with pretzels in it a stone's throw away, I might have noticed him. But he's not and the cat is, so here we are.

"Mr. Lucky," she said, indicating the cat had a name. "He's freeze dried." I mean, I'm weird and wacky, but this was even beyond my odd mentality in some ways. I do have plans to have myself mummified at my own funeral so that I'm wearing my favorite red suit holding my guitar in one hand with a "rock" hand symbol raised above my head with the other. And I get and even appreciate taxidermy to a certain extent. But freeze drying your pet cat? I'd just never heard of anything like it before.

"Is it your cat?" I asked. "No," she said. "It was someone's cat," she explained. I didn't want to suck up too much time as I was being paid by the hour and paid well, so I just let it go at that.

When I got home, I googled "freeze dried pets" and I came up with this. You must click to see, because words can't describe the feeling it gives you in your "oh my" part of your brain.

One thing I love about life is that every day we have the chance to see and learn and do something different and new. Sometimes it's something kinda weird, illegal or just plain wild. But it's always something new.