What Kind of Animal Are You? (The Prison Chronicles #3)

A Cat (Guy) Who Thought He Was a Cat (Feline)

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Okay, I’m going to get this rather bizarre tale out of the way so I can get to the good stuff — that is, the more encouraging (rather than simply interesting) accounts.

So far, I’ve only come close to deliberately setting off the alarm once. This is how that (almost) happened:

A visitor attended one of our meetings (everyone is invited to attend, as long as they behave themselves, the same as with our meetings on the outside/in the “free” world). I hadn’t seen him before, and I haven’t seen him since.

This was a case of my being naive or overly trusting or self-confident. He asked to talk to me in private. So we went into the office, and things turned weird almost immediately. He asked what sort of animal I was. I told him I was a human. He claimed to be a lion, or a tiger, or a liger (fictional creature made famous by Napoleon Dynamite). Truth be told, it wasn’t a liger; I don’t recall which animal he claimed to be, but it wasn’t a duck-billed platypus, a Koala bear, a puppy, or something of that nature. It was a rapacious, predatory beast.

That was when I realized he had problems I was not equipped to help him with. It got worse, though: he got agitated, stood up, pointed at something on the wall, reaching for it while simultaneously asking if he could have it. I blocked his way and told him “No!” He was still behaving belligerently, so I told him he’d have to leave the room immediately or I would sound the alarm. At least he was sane enough that the threat of getting in trouble with the prison authorities had the hoped-for effect on him: he vacated the premises.

That was (so far) the most hair-raising incident I’ve encountered there. It could have been a lot worse, to be sure, though. In fact, that was almost nothing compared to things that I sort of expected would happen when I first began volunteering at the prison.

In future episodes of The Prison Chronicles, I will relate several encouraging experiences that various detainees who attend our meetings had — events wherein they were rewarded for living by Bible principles in that challenging environment.

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