Lately, advertisements have featured individuals of more diverse types: blind, Down’s Syndrome, wheelchair users, persons with autism, and so forth. There are plus-size fashion models and those who have Down’s Syndrome or prosthetic limbs that they don’t try to hide when doing photoshoots or runway modeling. One model received particular praise for allowing her insulin pump to show beneath her designer clothes.

Now even disabled pets are used in advertising. You may not have noticed it, but every year those Cadbury TV commercials include not just the lion wearing bunny ears, but one pet chosen in some sort of contest in which fans nominate their own pets to appear. This year it’s Betty, a frog that beat out over 12,000 other submissions. Last year it was Lieutenant Dan, a dog who had only two legs and used a prosthetic/wheel-type device to allow it to get around better. It was hard to notice at first, but as the commercial was repeated (endlessly), it became easier to see. (The frog has no obvious disabilities. It sure looks weird with bunny ears, though.)

It’s good that pets with disabilities are finally getting some representation in the media. There are a lot of animals that need special care. There’s a no-kill cat shelter near me that has a whole room of special needs cats. Most of them have conditions that need medication, but some are vision- or hearing-impaired or have other sorts of disabilities. I once cat-sat for a week for a friend’s pets, one of whom needed insulin injections. He was really chill about it and never gave me a bit of trouble. He would just lie there and let me get on with it. Our cats were a little less chill when we had to give them subcutaneous fluid injections for failing kidneys, but they got used to it. (Our vet taught us how to do it. My husband would never be the one to stick the needle in. The extra fluid made the cat look lumpy until the body absorbed it. But I digress.) Other cats and dogs may be blind or mobility-challenged and simply need help going up and down stairs.

Shelters have a hard time placing animals that aren’t perfect and perky. The animals most often adopted are puppies and kittens, which are, after all, adorable. But there are plenty of other animals that need “forever” homes too. Not all of them have physical disabilities, either. Some dogs suffer from PTSD, especially if they were working dogs during the war in Afghanistan.

Others are elderly, well beyond the puppy/kitten stage. That’s not really a disability, except when it comes to being adopted. Dan and I have adopted senior cats fairly often. For one thing, they have the advantage of already knowing how to use a litter box, and they don’t climb the drapes the way kittens do. Many of them are already neutered.

It’s a shame when someone gives up a pet because it’s no longer perfect. But there are other reasons senior and disabled pets are considered unadoptable. For example, the pet might belong to a senior person who is no longer able to care for it anymore. Those reasons are understandable, but they may leave non-cute non-kittens and puppies stranded in shelters, sometimes for the rest of their lives – or have their lives cut short when no one adopts them.

What I’m saying is open your heart to a different sort of pet. Adopt the “unadoptable.” Consider that dog that needs a set of wheels or that cat that needs daily medication. If you provide a loving home, I guarantee that you will get that love back many times over. We owe it to pets to give a little help when they need it.

This week I posted a quote from the book The Cat Who Saved Books: A Novel, which is by Sosuke Natsukawa, not Lillian Jackson Braun as one might think. The “Quote of the Day” (a feature that my Nook e-reader will post to Facebook for me) was “Our best weapon for fighting all the pain and trouble in the world isn’t logic or violence. It’s humor.” In the book, the quote was spoken by the titular cat. The cat was right. Humor has the power to change the world, or at least our perception of it.

I was writing recently in my other blog (bipolarme.blog) about a time when laughter temporarily lifted me out of my depression. Here’s what happened:

My husband and I were sitting on the couch, watching TV. I was not enjoying it. Then a commercial came on about “man-boosting” pills that increase testosterone. It promised everything: strength, leanness, stamina, and outstanding performance in the bedroom.

Dan turned to me and said, “Hey, honey. Maybe I should try some of that. Improve my performance in bed-woo-woo-woo!

I turned and looked him straight in the eyes. I said, in a solemn, deadpan voice, without a trace of a snicker: Woo. Woo. I never got to the third Woo because we both dissolved in giggles. And it felt good – not only that I could laugh, but that I could make him laugh. Just thinking about it made us laugh all over again.

It didn’t cure my depression, of course, but it helped me that day. I can’t say, as the quote goes, that laughter is the best medicine. (Although I did write a humorous essay about the flu (https://butidigress.blog/2022/01/09/when-you-have-the-flu-some-unsolicited-advice/).) But occasionally it is good for what ails you.

I once described books as being like mashed potatoes – comfort food for the mind. I read a lot of books that aren’t humorous at all, such as ones about people dying on Everest or dystopian science fiction novels. But there are comic novels that I return to again and again. One of these is a sci-fi book (though not dystopian), A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold. If, as has been said, that writing a novel is the process of creating a character and then throwing rocks at him (or her), then this novel was the epitome of that philosophy.

Subtitled A Comedy of Biology and Manners, the novel takes the main character (who previously appeared in a number of extremely serious novels) and throws massive rocks at him. Bujold loads the rocks in the first section of the book but withholds the trebuchet that lobs them at our hero till halfway through. Then the reader gets comic disaster, a memorable dinner party scene where that building tension is released. The rest of the novel involves the hero trying to clean up the repercussions. Then all the various subplots come together in a magnificent tour de force (or farce, really) that really satisfies.

Two of my favorite writers, James Thurber and Erma Bombeck, took a gentler approach to humor. In their stories and essays, they explored the foibles of personalities and life itself. The past and the present, the fictional and nonfictional, the wry and the absurd were their tools. (Both writers were from Ohio, a coincidence that gives me hope when I try to write something humorous. But I digress.)

A Supreme Court Justice once said that he couldn’t define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it. Humor is therefore the same as pornography, at least in that respect. I can’t really define what makes a piece of writing humorous, but I know it when I see it. And I laugh. That makes the world a better place for me to be.

I have a taste for ginger. I like ginger tea, ginger brandy, ginger ale, ginger beer, pickled ginger, ginger snaps, and gingerbread. I have been known to binge on ginger, dunking ginger snaps in ginger tea. I was first inspired to order a drink called a Dark and Stormy because one of the principal ingredients is ginger beer. In fact, the one recipe I was inspired to make after watching Food Network for years was a Three-Ginger Cookie that contained fresh ginger, powdered ginger, and crystallized (candied) ginger. (It was from Ina Garten. Among the things I learned between baking my first and second batch was that when she says jumbo eggs, she means jumbo eggs, not medium, which is what I usually have on hand. But I digress.)

Recently, however, I learned another meaning for ginger. Apparently, it also means a person who has red hair. It can be a pejorative term in British English, possibly because of its associations with red-haired, freckled Irish people, with whom the English have not always been friendly. A quick check of the definition and connotations reveals that gingers are said to be descended from Prometheus, fiery in temperament, and likely to be featured in pop girl groups. Wikipedia has an entire section devoted to discrimination against gingers and even hate crimes against them.

Famous gingers in my life have been my mother-in-law, my brother-in-law, and my husband. My husband was technically a ginger only from the nose down. He had a fine red beard and mustache, but hair of an unassuming brown. (Of course, now he is gray above the eyebrows as well as beneath the nose.) My grandmother Winnie Rose was also a natural ginger and kept her hair dyed that color until her husband died, when it was replaced with a beautiful snowy white.

In other words, I have the ginger gene in my family tree, though it didn’t express itself in me. (The freckles did. If I had been born a redhead, my mother would have named me Winnie after my grandmother. I don’t know whether that would have been a good thing or a bad thing, as far as teasing goes. But I digress. Again.)

In my younger years, I decided to catch up with my genes and dye my hair, if not true ginger, at least auburn. Gradually, I became bold enough to add more red to the mix. Once when I was wearing an Ireland t-shirt and flaunting my auburn hair, someone asked me if I was Irish. I replied, “No, I had to pay extra for this.” I’m going to Ireland later this spring and intend to have auburn hair again for the occasion. I’ll at least be an honorary ginger.

Another meaning I have learned for ginger is what I always called an orange cat. Thanks principally to Hermione Granger, I now know that such cats are also called gingers. My husband is quite fond of ginger cats, preferentially selecting them when we need a new cat. I have even heard these cats called red cats, though I think that’s a little inaccurate. They’re not really a color I would call red. But then again, I think red hair is not usually the same shade as a fire engine, except among the more adventurous colorists who have tired of pink and purple.

What all that means is that I love all kinds of gingers – the flavor, the hair, and the cats! Life would be a lot duller without them.