Vocabulary #6 (Test May 3)

Ozzie’s Nine Lives

Words In Context

You have received these words on Monday April 29, 2013 (unless you were absent)

The Test On These Words Will be on Friday, May 3, 2013

            It’s a cliché that cats have nine lives, but Ozzie, it seems, really does.

            When Ozzie’s predecessor, Poochie, was hit by a car, we promised my son that he could pick out another cat.  At the North Shore Animal League, Ozzie was hard to miss.  The size of one’s fist, he was mostly black, with an irresistible white smudge right on his mouth.

            Because he liked to play ball (a fairly unusual activity for a cat) and because he seemed so agile, my son named him Ozzie, in honor of Ozzie Smith, the St. Louis Cardinals’ shortstop whose defensive wizardly earned him the nickname, “The Wizard of Oz.”

            Before long we could tell that something wasn’t right.  Ozzie would huddle by the refrigerator’s exhaust, one of the warmer spots of the kitchen, and he gradually became less and less vigorous.  The veterinarian disclosed that Ozzie was suffering from such a nasty case of ear mites.  An infection had ensued, and surgery would be necessary.  It would be the first of many trying episodes.

            Several years later, when Ozzie was an adult (remember that one cat year equals about seven human years), we were enjoying a fairly large dinner party.  For an early spring night, the weather was unusually warm, so I opened the living room window.  Later that evening, when our guests had left and we had begun to clean up, Ozzie was nowhere to be found.  Apparently, he had escaped through the open window.  We could not find him that night.  Distraught as we were, we slept poorly.

            The next day we embarked upon a plan to find him.  First, we scoured our neighborhood, but to no avail.  Then we posted “lost cat” signs on every block.  Over the next few days, as the phone would ring, we responded to one false sighting after another.  Then the phone stopped ringing.  We tried to resist morbid thoughts, but we could not keep them from our minds. 

            It was a gray day in mid-April.  The chill had returned.  Deciding to get in with our lives as well as we might in the post-Ozzie era, we returned to some degree of normalcy.  To get some errands done, we piled into the car, and as I pulled out of the driveway, my wife called, “Stop!  Stop!  It’s Ozzie?” There he was resting in the dirt, trying to absorb the day’s few warming rays of sunshine.  Where he had gone for the better part of week we would never know.  Clearly, Ozzie wasn’t talking. 

            A few years later Ozzie became seriously ill.  It was evident that his joints had swelled and had begun to ache badly.  It was hard for him to move.  His actual illness was hard to diagnose, but it was clear that his immune system wasn’t working properly.  In effect, his body’s defenses were attacking his own joints.  Eventually his doctor found medication that worked, and his condition improved, but Ozzie would suffer several recurrences of this disease.

            With a cat like this, it’s hard to keep score of exactly how many lives he’s already used up-and how many remain (at least, according to the cliché).  As we like to say, it’s a good thing he’s cute.

For Example: diagnose – v  – identification of a disease or cause of anything.

           

Sentence Example:  The doctors said my illness was difficult to diagnose.