Have you ever had something happen to you that you’re pretty sure no one will believe; something that seems too outl andish to be true? Thanks to a couple of recent events, I now have a story like that.
It all started with our cat, Banjo. He was strictly an indoor cat but one day my wife and I came home from work to discover he was missing. We searched for hours, hunting through the house, looking in the garage, checking the attic but he was nowhere to be found. It seemed he had simply disappeared. We went to bed devastated; we’d had Banjo since he was a kitten. Though neither of us felt particularly cheerful the next morning, my wife still hurried to clean the kitchen while I ironed my shirt before work. She quickly threw out the trash then, having loaded the dishwasher the morning before, reached down to turn it on. To our shock, the normally silent appliance set up an appalling racket the moment it started. The screeching and yowling that emanated from within were unlike anything I had ever heard. I stood there, bewildered but with an exclamation of horror, my wife leapt forward and pulled the dishwasher open. The door had no sooner lowered than out bounded an extremely bedraggled and very angry ball of matted, wet fur. It seemed we had found Banjo. Though it took a while to figure out how he had come to be in the dishwasher in the first place, we finally concluded that that he must have climbed into it the morning before while my wife wasn’t looking. The abundance of white fur in the cake pan on the bottom rack seemed to confirm this suspicion though why he hadn’t protested at some point and started meowing to be let out is beyond me.
We were relieved to find that Banjo was completely fine but unfortunately the same couldn’t be said for the dishwasher. The profusion of fur he’d left behind had damaged it beyond repair. If that had been the only bad thing to come from it all though, I would have been fine. Sadly it was not. In all the chaos of trying to catch the irate Banjo and attempting to dry him off before leaving for the day, it seems that I’d left the iron on, face down, on the cloth ironing board cover. I had barely walked into work before I got the frantic phone call from my wife. The kitchen had caught on fire and while they’d been able to keep it from spreading to the rest of the house, the kitchen had been pretty much destroyed.
Six weeks and one renovation later, everything had finally worked out. A call to our insurance agent had assured us that the fire would be covered by our homeowners insurance and my wife was happy with her new kitchen. We put in a stainless steel dishwasher to replace the old one and bought new appliances to match. As for Banjo, he also fared pretty well. He ended up with a comfy new bed to ensure he wouldn’t end up in the dishwasher again anytime soon and I came out with one unbelievable story!
