The Engine that Purred

by Dale McGeehon

One woman who works as a secretary in Cairo bought a donkey. As all those who have served in or visited Cairo can attest, donkeys are a necessary, but loathsome creature for Egyptians. It is a strong insult to call someone a humaar, a donkey, in Arabic, for example.

Often enduring the sharp sting from a whip or a slap from a piece of wood, donkeys pull garbage and vegetable carts for miles at a time. They carry heavy loads of dirt through the desert and farmland. In their eyes, you can see a trace of sadness, but they perform their work with little complaint.

One day, the secretary was driving her car near the pyramids and saw a particularly ragged donkey pulling a vegetable cart. Its body was covered in cuts and sores. Flies swarmed around it, trying to get at the moisture from the oozing wounds.

Feeling sorry for the animal, the woman stopped her car and flagged down the cart's driver. She told him she wanted to buy the donkey from him, opened her purse and pulled out all the money she had: $100. The man had probably never seen so much money in his life and readily accepted her offer.

As she walked the donkey to the stables near the pyramids, she looked back at the man. He seemed overcome with delight at his sudden fortune until he turned and looked at his vegetable cart and realized that he now had no way to get it home. The abrupt change in his expression was worth the price of the donkey, she said.

The last time I heard, the donkey was recovering nicely and enjoying some time off from hard labor at its new home at the horse stables near the pyramids.

As for my wife and myself, we acquired our first pet, a cat, from the streets of Cairo. In April two years ago, a friend of ours was walking his dog when he came upon a curious scene. A woman had stopped her car because she kept hearing unfamiliar sounds coming from her engine. Several men had gathered around to find the source of the noise.

Reaching down into the bottom of the engine, one of the men extracted a howling and greasy kitten. Apparently, it had crawled into the motor to explore or keep warm and had been given an unwanted tour of Cairo. The woman had heard its shrieking cries of terror and stopped to investigate.

As the man with the kitten volunteered to rid the woman of the nuisance by beating its head against a tree or throwing it into the Nile, our friend said, no, he'd take the little creature. He and his wife cleaned it up, house-trained it and gave it its first shots.

Meanwhile, we had been shopping around for a pet. As we had no children yet, we wanted to get our parental instincts in gear—sort of do a trial run with responsibility without having to worry about feeding times, diapers or college tuition. We heard about our friends' new acquisition and because they already had two cats, they generously passed the kitten on to us.

Now for a name.

Since he had had such a grueling adventure for one so young (about six weeks old), we decided to give him a name that related to that event. It should have something to do with an engine part, we agreed. Spark plug? No. A.C. Delco? Not really. Quaker State? Please. Spare us.

Then I thought of that commercial that used to come on every time there was a Monday Night Football game. There were cars parked overnight on a frozen Minnesota lake with their headlights on. But only one car had started the next morning, despite being covered in snow. Why? Because it had that certain high-quality battery. Let's see....what was the name of that battery? I remember: Diehard! Perfect, we thought. The name certainly gives a sense that the possessor would cling to life, as he had done in the car engine.

One of the drawbacks, though, is that we often have to explain to others that he did not get the name because he is a particularly big Bruce Willis fan. He isn't. And neither are we. "The reason he got the name," we always have to say, "is..."

Well, now you know the story.

As a tangential epilogue to this tale, our Egyptian veterinarian who makes house calls (can you believe it?) once told us when the cat was six months old: "Egyptian cat on American food make big cat."

Sure enough, this two-year-old orange and white tabby mix with blue eyes has grown up to weigh 15 pounds.

As this small tiger was curled up napping not long ago, it occurred to me that "Diehard" really is a strange name for a cat. Oh well, I thought, why be normal?

©1995 Dale McGeehon. All Rights Reserved.