Keeping these two separated a catty move

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Gary and feline friend Papa are back together again in Deloraine. (SUBMITTED PHOTO)

Being a former print journalist, Linda Slobodian knew what do and who to call when she needed help taking on a health authority that wasn't using its heart, never mind its brain.

But the 55-year-old wasn't looking for help for herself. It was for a neighbour in the southwestern Manitoba town of Deloraine, whose story she thought would appeal to me.

"It involves the bond between an eccentric -- definitely ostracized and sometimes bullied -- 64-year-old man named Gary and a wild cat that he tamed."

A cat he named Papa.

Having introduced the two central characters, Linda went straight to the plot line. On a Sunday in early October, a mental-health caregiver, who works for the Assiniboine Regional Health Authority, had the cat removed and relocated to a farm about 20 kilometres away. The so-called caregiver, a proctor as she's officially known, had decided Gary was in breach of a town bylaw that only allows two cats and a dog in a residence.

Gary doesn't have a dog, but Papa was the third cat.

"Losing the cat disturbed Gary deeply," Linda told me.

Then, just over a month later, something remarkable happened.

On Remembrance Day, Gary heard scratching at the door of his mobile home. The cat had come back.

Somehow, the former feral cat had found his way home from 20 kilometres away.

Papa was back with his daddy, true to their special bond.

That same night, Gary phoned Linda to give her the almost unbelievable news.

"In the two years that I've known him," Linda recalled, "I've never seen Gary so happy."

But Linda's own happiness was tempered with concern.

She was afraid Gary's and Papa's happiness wouldn't last; that when the so-called caregiver found out the cat was back, Papa would be taken away again.

"Gordon," Linda said, "I know it is just a lonely man and his cat, but sometimes a cat is almost all a man has to love him."

So it was that on Friday, I reached the so-called caregiver on her mobile phone. I asked her why, in the first place, she felt she had to take the cat away from Gary.

"The cat is not his," she spat. "It's a stray."

Besides, she added, he has two cats of his own. And there's this bylaw forbidding three.

Now the woman, whose duties include supervising Gary's housekeeping and supposedly helping to make his life easier, had a question for me.

A question that suggested why she really wanted Papa gone.

She asked if I had ever smelled cat spray? The suggestion being that Gary's mobile home smelled of cat pee and she had to endure it.

But according to Linda, who had visited Gary's mobile home, cleanliness is not an issue with the cats.

Later Friday, I spoke with Debbie Clevett, the Assiniboine Regional Health Authority's vice-president of community health. Privacy provisions prevented her from speaking to any individual case, she said, but she defended the hypothetical instance of a caregiver enforcing a city bylaw.

"We have to make difficult decisions that are in everyone's best interest," Clevett said.

Difficult?

The regional health authority executive's attitude seemed to be it was necessary to do the bureaucratic right thing -- to follow the letter of the bylaw -- rather than looking the other way in the case of such a borderline breach. Especially when the cat is obviously good for Gary's mental health. That, and not bylaw enforcement, is supposed to be the regional health authority's prime concern.

Speaking of concerns, Linda Slobodian had one herself.

It was with the proctor, and the way she treated Gary generally, which Linda described as "unprofessional" and "disturbing" in a formal complaint that arrived at the ARHA Monday morning.

Later that same morning, I spoke with Gary by phone. He had breaking news for me.

Linda's advocating had made a difference. The proctor's supervisor had been instructed not to remove Papa again. And Linda's complaint about the proctor was being seriously pursued.

Gary was so grateful.

But what about Papa?

"He's rubbing up against my leg right now," Gary said.

Hey, it wasn't exactly Woodward reunited with Bernstein. Still, it's a wonderful feeling for a pair of old journalists to be able to bring a smile to a man's face. And justice to the cat who came back.

gordon.sinclair @freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 29, 2011 0