From here on out, I can give you very little information about the asylum.  Not because I don't know.  Quite the contrary.  I know more about the last fifty years than any other time of the asylum's history.  But as we approach our current time line, it becomes too easy for me to slip up with a name or a fact that can be readily checked, exposing the people and the location of the asylum.  For example, if I acquainted you with any details involving the tragic fire that devastated the asylum some years ago, you could verify these facts with the media and pinpoint where I am writing from.  Perhaps even telling you that there was a fire at all is too much.

What I can tell you is a little bit about myself and a story or two.

Let's start with a story.

My predecessor Dr. C., was a woman of great wisdom and integrity.  She happened to be very attractive, as well, reminding me in looks and mannerisms of a young Audrey Hepburn.  She spent less than a decade here, unable to handle the emotional hurricane within these walls.   After leaving, she married her college sweetheart and move out west.  I heard a rumor that she recently became a grandmother.

But while she was here, Dr. C. wished for her legacy to be in discovering alternate, more natural, techniques to treat the patients.  She was appalled with the common methods of the day used to combat severe depression, such as electroshock and ice baths.  A few years before I joined the staff at the asylum, she hired a new assistant, we'll call her Jane, from a reputable university who had recently finished a thesis on the study of human consciousness and cats.

You read that correctly.  Cats.

Apparently cats have a soothing quality over people and can often alleviate depression.  Jane's first course of action was to play a low level purring sound over the intercom system several hours a day.  I can only imagine how annoying that must have been after a few short days.  When that idea failed to develope the results she had expected, Jane somehow convinced Dr. C. to allow her to fill the asylum with cats from a local shelter.

Aside from the few patients with allergies, most of them did respond positively.  Unfortunately, none of them really bonded with any particular cat, so the whole experiment only resulted in some comic relief, at best.  And after just a few months, the cats were out of control.  They were everywhere.  From what I have heard, the asylum looked more like a free roaming animal shelter than an asylum.  I literally have dozens of photographs left in the bottom desk drawers, all of cats from those days.

Jane was asked to terminate the project as quickly as possible.  Unwilling to return the felines to the shelter from where they came, she spent countless hours finding them all homes.  When she as done, Jane was transferred to another facility.

Unknown to the staff at the time, Jane had not been able to find them all.  To this day, the asylum still has a few cats surviving within these grounds.  I personally adopted a black cat that I found living in the lower east wing storage basement a year after my wife passed away.  The little mouser had strange front paws with seven or eight toes each.  I named her Sanity.  We were almost constant companions until she died in her sleep, lying next to me some twelve years later.  Yes, there's an obvious pun there, that on that day I lost my Sanity, but that seems to cheapen what she meant to me.  No one will ever no how much that little animal held my life together.

Jane, where ever you are - thank you.