As she sat in her chair sipping Rwandan dark roast coffee in the library of the Emerald Victorian on Raglan Road in Hibernia, Laetitia was deep in thought. Starting tomorrow, she would begin to tour the American West, starting in Hawaii and Alaska and then the states west of the Mississippi River in the lower 48 United States. Numerous Hollywood films and novels about cowboys and Indians had created a mystique that she thought would make the western tour popular. She would do the eastern United States in due course, but thought that she would likely do a tour of the UK in between. Eventually she would probably do Canada and continental Europe and more of the world, but at this point she hadn’t decided where.
She wasn’t leading a tour today, but she needed to write a limerick. She wasn’t coming up with anything until she thought of Patsy’s cat, “Limerick.” On one of her tours a woman named Patsy had asked her to write a limerick for Limerick. Patsy was taking out her garbage one night when she saw a small gray furry animal that she thought was a rat rummaging through the trash. When she returned after obtaining a flashlight and shovel from the garage, she found that the animal was in fact a kitten. She fed him and took him to the veterinarian on the next day to have his health checked, and found that it had a microchip that revealed its owner’s name and that the kitten had been born on St. Patrick’s Day. She tried to contact the owner and found the kitten belonged to a student who apparently dumped him when he left town. She decided to keep the kitten and named him “Limerick” because of his birthday. This is Limerick’s limerick.
Now Limerick’s a grey Irish cat
Who was born on the day of St. Pat
Whom Patsy took home
‘Cause she wished to atone
The day that she thought him a rat.