HERE,
KITTY KITTY
From the Chapter "All in
the Family"
No
self-respecting southern male will have anything to do with a cat, in any way,
shape or form. Other than
occasionally reducing the mouse and rat population, a cat just ain’t worth a
whole lot. Before you cat lovers
start meowing, spitting, and hissing, let me make one thing perfectly clear.
When I said pets earlier I was mainly talking about dogs, birds,
squirrels, hamsters, guinea pigs, and the like.
I did not include cats, as I can’t recall anyone in our family ever
having a cat as a pet, with the exception of my brother.
He has a cat only because his wife makes him do it.
One of our sons inherited a cat that came as a package deal with his
wife, but the cat was soon transferred to a different location, and never really
counted.
When
my oldest was young and foolish, he totaled his Datsun 200X at
two o’clock
one morning by running up on a curb at a high
rate of speed, destroying everything underneath the car. His rather incogitable
explanation was that he was trying to dodge a cat in the street and ran up on
the curb in the process. I may look
stupid but I did not just hit town with the latest truckload of turnips.
There is not a family male, at least not a son of mine, who would miss
the opportunity to nail a cat in the road, especially if he could do so without
damaging his car. If he had told me
he was trying to hit the cat and ran up on the curb, I would have been proud of
him and more prone to believe his malodorous tale.
I come by my
negative feelings about cats honestly. When
I was in high school I wanted to ask a good looking girl I had a crush on for a
date, but I was chicken. It took
months for me to get up the nerve but I finally asked her for a date and, lo and
behold, she accepted. I showed up at
the appointed time on a perfect summer Saturday night, a picture of sartorial
splendor, dressed to the nines in my faded Madras button-down shirt, broke-in
and soft Levi’s, and Bass Weejuns with no socks.
The scent of Old Spice cologne wreathed my head like clouds around the
summit of
Mount Kilimanjaro
. I
could have worn English Leather or Canoe cologne, but I didn’t want to show
out on this first date.
Her mother
greeted me and said, “She’ll be ready in a little bit.
Go sit over there in the Lazy Boy.”
Has there
ever been, in the history of all mankind, a female who has been ready to go when
her date shows up at the appropriate time? I had no way of knowing that their
mean, perpetually ticked-off, extremely territorial Siamese cat lived up under
that Lazy Boy chair into which I was about to deposit my innocent posterior.
Everything was fine until I leaned back just a mite and pinched the
cat’s tail in the spring of the chair.
The cat
didn’t come out from under the chair where it would have been a fair fight.
Oh, no. She stayed up under
the chair where I couldn’t get to her and began to use my bare ankles for
scratching posts. I didn’t want to
embarrass myself, so I sat there humming “
Dixie
” and grimacing, taking my medicine like a
real man, not once letting a tear fall from my eyes. My
date finally strolled into the room, and I managed to extricate myself from the
ten-foot long, razor sharp claws of the cat, and stand up.
As we were
walking down the sidewalk to my car (I was half walking, half limping because my
ankles were torn, bleeding, and felt like they were on fire), my
not-quite-so-gorgeous-anymore date looked down at my ankles and said, “I see
you met our cat, Jezebel. I should
have warned you she hates the smell of Old Spice.
It makes her crazy and drives her into a murderous rage.”
I decided in
that instant that whatever my future held, it did not include this sweet young
thing or her sorry, Old Spice-hating Siamese cat.
No great loss; she, sadly, didn’t know how to kiss very good anyhow.
STAYING
OUT OF SKEETER’S WAY
For some
inexplicable reason, there are times when a perfectly good dog will act like a
cat. My sister has a little Jack
Russell terrier named Skeeter. His
size is the only thing small about this dog.
He is feisty, aggressive, and rules their house with an iron paw.
He is extremely territorial and provides a significant degree of comfort
to their family at night as he guards the premises.
We recently
went to see them and were greeted at the front door by Skeeter.
He wagged his tail and licked my wife’s hand in greeting, just as
friendly as he could be. He turned
and greeted me by waging a vicious attack on my bare ankles, not unlike that
Siamese cat named Jezebel. He tore
my ankles up. It was like déjà vu,
all over again. As I was dancing
around trying to get out of his clutches, I accidentally stepped on his tail.
That only served to infuriate him and to increase the intensity of his
attack.
My
sister finally got him to stop treating my ankles like fried pork chops.
For the duration of our entire visit he sat on the end of the sofa where
I was sitting, squinting his eyes at me and growling softly, daydreaming about
what he would do if he ever got me alone again.
I shudder at the thought.
The Story Page
|