COMMUNITY SPIRIT, AND DEXTER THE CAT, ARE ALIVE AND WELL
Apr 5, 2009
They found the Mayor of Haultain Street. He was meowing outside a veterinary office on Carey Road.
I suppose I should start from the beginning.
On Tuesday I was in the Koffi Coffee shop on Haultain Street in Victoria. Out of the corner of my attention I noticed a woman enter and proclaim to the man behind the counter “they found Dexter.” This seemed to generate a lot of excitement from the man and a woman employee who joined the discussion. That employee said she needed to make a sign after she heard how “Dexter” was found way out on Carey Road. Soon a sheet of paper was fixed to both coffee shop doors that announced, in brightly coloured marker, Dexter had been found.
Dexter, I learned, was a neighbourhood cat.
I retreated to my own business once the distraction passed, but my concentration was pulled back when a group of young kids poured through the door and shouted “they found Dexter?” From that moment on nearly every patron who entered the coffee shop asked the same question. The ones who didn’t ask were told. They all had sounds of relief, surprise and joy in their voices.
When this continued for an hour and a half, I figured there was more to this than a missing cat.
The operator and co-owner of Koffi, Alan Pang, told me everybody in the community knows the big orange feline, “he says hi to everyone.” In fact, Pang even has pictures of the cat ready to show me. One of the customers, Rainy Hopewell who lives a short distance away, describes herself as Dexter’s aunt. I’m told Dexter has a regular chair at the barber shop across the street, that he’s known at the video store, that he comes and goes from many people’s homes... and that he has shared a bed with several of the locals.
A woman named Bonnie who doesn’t even live in the neighbourhood recognized the cat by name. She also repeated to me a nickname that kept coming up: the Mayor of Haultain Street.
Despite his free-spirit, “The Mayor” has an owner – Marni Offman. Offman plastered the neighbourhood and the internet in missing cat notices when Dexter didn’t come home on February 27. On Tuesday she heard back that Dexter might be at the North Douglas Veterinary Clinic on Carey Road. She immediately took a 20 minute cab ride and found her cat safe and healthy, apparently Dexter meowed at the door of the vet’s office to get attention. “That’s Dexter,” said Hopewell at the coffee shop, “he knows how to find help if he needs it.”
“I’m amazed,” said Offman, “I just couldn’t give up hope.”
Offman thinks somebody must have taken Dexter to the Carey Road area. It’s a disturbing thought but one that’s greatly outweighed by the sense of community this ordeal, and this cat, seems to have instilled upon the neighbourhood. Offman says some neighbours have even offered to pay for an identification chip for Dexter. “I think it’s what community is about,” Offman said. “I probably... know more people in the community because the cat breaks the ice.”
Not to belittle Dexter’s harrowing journey and tale of survival, but the aspect that interested me most was how it brought so many people in this little corner of Victoria together. It’s nothing commercial or contrived, and it has connected a community in a unique way. I’m glad they found the Mayor of Haultain Street.
- RYAN PRICE
