Because Felis catus

1.

Interior Designer

2.

Plea Bargainer

3.

Carpet Cleaner and Photo Bomber

4.

Nursing Aide

5.

Apprentice Tutor

When I notice the cat fur

stuck to my awful popcorn ceilings
glued to the ceiling fan blades
stuffed under the hateful carpet edges
artistically lining a plate just taken out of the dishwasher
littering my favorite warm in-house pullover
in my sheets and my nose and my sink and . . .

then . . .


I need to look where
it should be
so I remember
I love cats
anyway

Lord Love a Cat

Here’s What Happened When God Let Cats Loose Upon the World

by Gene Weingarten

The Washington Post

The following document was obtained from sources close to God. Translated from the original Aramaic, it is a transcript of the final exit interview before Cat was loosed upon the world.

Cat: I have some demands.

God: That is not how it worketh, Cat.

Cat: I shall scratch their bellies and draw blood.

God: Fine.

Cat: Really?

God: Yes.

Cat: I shall to do it a lot.

God: I sayeth, fine.

Cat: I shall use my claws to communicate “no,” “yes,” “thank you,” “I’m bored” and “I love you.”

God: Okay.

Cat: I shall be doing some indiscriminate biting of bare feet.

God: That is strictly prohibited.

Cat: Freelance biting, then. Also, I am a lion.

God: Thou art a cat. Thou art not much larger than a baked potato.

Cat: MEOW!!

God: [Laughter.] Was that supposed to be a roar? Oooh, oooh, I am so afraid!

Cat: I am immune to mockery.

God: Are we done here?

Cat: I will say “Let there be light,” and there will be light!

God: That is taken care of already, Cat. Instead, I shall give you the power to cure cancer in those who care for you. You may exercise this power with compassion and gratitude anytime you wish.

Cat: Nah. Too much of a hassle.

God: Fine.

Cat: I will neither “fetch” nor “sit.” Do I have a name?

God: You shall be given a name, yes. It might be Tommy or Sandra or a name that is dreadful like Fluffykins.

Cat: I shall never respond to it.

God: Fine.

Cat: I shall never have to go on “walks.”

God: Fine.

Cat: Fine?

God: Indeed. That leads us to a central issue, Cat. You shall poop in a box.

Cat: WHAT?

God: A little box. From the time you are a small suckling you will know that you must do this and you will never, ever, ever make a mistake about this.

Cat: No!

God: Your life depends on it. Trusteth me on this.

Cat: I cannot ...

God: You can and you will. You scratch bellies. You bite feet. You live as a saboteur. You are an unconscionable jerk. In return for this license you will poop in a little box.

Cat: I am a very good boy.

God: You are not.

Cat: The sand that I shall poop in? Is it expensive?

God: Yes, it is very expensive, indeed.

Cat: Fine.

A Day in the Life of a Housecat

Mine start their day when mine begins. I don't know how, but they always know when I'll rise (before I do). At some point before I wake, they're both on the bed (where they have not been all night): BigAssCat on my right mid-body and Doodlebug on my left at head-level. As soon as I stir, they purr and insist on being stroked.

Then it's time for food for BAC and more cuddling for D.

After about an hour during which they check all their usual haunts for the occasional bug or odd bit of fluff on the floor, they take their morning naps.

One more brief mid-day period of activity is followed by the Long Afternoon Sleep, after which they plead for a sit by the kitchen screen door.

When I start closing up before bed, they wait on the steps. As soon as I turn on the stairway light, BAC leans in for a nose-to-nose check, then bounds upstairs, me following, and Doodle makes up the rear in one long leap from stairs to bed, where she stretches out like an apostrophe, belly up.

While BAC noshes and D cleans herself, I scoop out the litter box, after which BigAssCat bounds in (only when I lock the lid), insisting always that she'll be first.

More play, some cuddling, lights out, and they disappear.

In my next life, I'd like to be somebody's well-loved feline companion, like Tigger whose human lets him roam wherever he wants. Here he's on the kitchen island, aiming for a head butt. (And yes, he got what he wanted.)

I Bet I Know What You're Thinking, Doodlebug

Let the cat out of the bag!

 

  NOW!

The Cat-Sack, a vet's best friend and a cat's mother's delight!

On Celebrating Easter without Being Religious

Bells!

They started on Good Friday, at the wrong time (there are usual times and then are wrong ones because they are unusual).

It took me several minutes to remember the Way of the Cross.

Then, this morning, knowing that it was Easter, I heard bells twice -- once at the lake


and once at home, when Doodlebug expressed dismay:

She wasn't too sure about the bells, but me? I love them! 

Even when they ring at night, which they did last night.

I wouldn't mind Easter once a week if it's bring on the bells.

Finding Peace in Wintry Mix

Snow in the morning.

Rain by noon.

Cold by night.

This is winter.

All good cats (and people who don't have to go elsewhere) know the remedy: stay put.

Something Frightening This Way Came

BigAssCat, sleeping in the chair next to me, suddenly sprang into action at the same time I did when we heard Doodlebug scramble down the hallway, turn the corner, and fly under the dining room table. When I finally coaxed her out, she ran into the study, fur still fluffed, and hid under the futon, cowering. Perhaps three or so minutes later, tail still puffed, she managed to stand near me, alert and focused on the doorway into the hall.

I decided to investigate. 

I looked out the living room windows into the darkness. Nothing. 

I looked out onto the deck into darkness. Nothing. 

I turned on the deck lights. Nothing. 

I went to the entry, peered through the window at the little lit deer, and something appeared. On opening the door, I found tracks -- lots and lots and lots of them.

Tracks emerged from or disappeared into the yard toward the street, and into the scrubby clearing or trees toward both neighbors' houses, into the darkness alongside my own house, and straight across the length of the porch, where the scooped snow undulated in waves. 

This is most certainly where Doodlebug must have seen or heard them, as she was probably sleeping in the chair by the front porch windows.

I do not know who visited, and I do not know where they went, but I do hope two things: A/ that they did not find shelter under or in my house, and B/ that they do find a warm place for the night.

Addendum: Immediatly after pressing Publish, I looked for the cats and found both of them on the chair, their heads parting the curtains, noses pressed to the window. Looks like the little one isn't so afraid if the big one is with her.

The Comma Cat

scores the music of my day, stretching and vocalizing well before sun-up each day, pouncing on the bed (and me), stretching and re-stretching off and on all day, behind my back or in my lap, content, sleeping on the chair in an unmistakable curl or waking and stretching on the floor, again assuming the position when she begs the nightly rub-down, Doodle makes me slow down.

Essay: In Praise of the Humble Comma

by Pico Iyer

The gods, they say, give breath, and they take it away. But the same could be said -- could it not? -- of the humble comma. Add it to the present clause, and, of a sudden, the mind is, quite literally, given pause to think; take it out if you wish or forget it and the mind is deprived of a resting place. Yet still the comma gets no respect. It seems just a slip of a thing, a pedant's tick, a blip on the edge of our consciousness, a kind of printer's smudge almost. Small, we claim, is beautiful (especially in the age of the microchip). Yet what is so often used, and so rarely recalled, as the comma -- unless it be breath itself?

Punctuation, one is taught, has a point: to keep up law and order. Punctuation marks are the road signs placed along the highway of our communication -- to control speeds, provide directions and prevent head-on collisions. A period has the unblinking finality of a red light; the comma is a flashing yellow light that asks us only to slow down; and the semicolon is a stop sign that tells us to ease gradually to a halt, before gradually starting up again. By establishing the relations between words, punctuation establishes the relations between the people using words. That may be one reason why schoolteachers exalt it and lovers defy it ("We love each other and belong to each other let's don't ever hurt each other Nicole let's don't ever hurt each other," wrote Gary Gilmore to his girlfriend). A comma, he must have known, "separates inseparables," in the clinching words of H.W. Fowler, King of English Usage.

Punctuation, then, is a civic prop, a pillar that holds society upright. (A run-on sentence, its phrases piling up without division, is as unsightly as a sink piled high with dirty dishes.) Small wonder, then, that punctuation was one of the first proprieties of the Victorian age, the age of the corset, that the modernists threw off: the sexual revolution might be said to have begun when Joyce's Molly Bloom spilled out all her private thoughts in 36 pages of unbridled, almost unperioded and officially censored prose; and another rebellion was surely marked when E.E. Cummings first felt free to commit "God" to the lower case.

Punctuation thus becomes the signature of cultures. The hot-blooded Spaniard seems to be revealed in the passion and urgency of his doubled exclamation points and question marks ("Caramba! Quien sabe?"), while the impassive Chinese traditionally added to his so-called inscrutability by omitting directions from his ideograms. The anarchy and commotion of the '60s were given voice in the exploding exclamation marks, riotous capital letters and Day-Glo italics of Tom Wolfe's spray-paint prose; and in Communist societies, where the State is absolute, the dignity -- and divinity -- of capital letters is reserved for Ministries, Sub-Committees and Secretariats.

Yet punctuation is something more than a culture's birthmark; it scores the music in our minds, gets our thoughts moving to the rhythm of our hearts. Punctuation is the notation in the sheet music of our words, telling us when to rest, or when to raise our voices; it acknowledges that the meaning of our discourse, as of any symphonic composition, lies not in the units but in the pauses, the pacing and the phrasing. Punctuation is the way one bats one's eyes, lowers one's voice or blushes demurely. Punctuation adjusts the tone and color and volume till the feeling comes into perfect focus: not disgust exactly, but distaste; not lust, or like, but love.

Punctuation, in short, gives us the human voice, and all the meanings that lie between the words. "You aren't young, are you?" loses its innocence when it loses the question mark. Every child knows the menace of a dropped apostrophe (the parent's "Don't do that" shifting into the more slowly enunciated "Do not do that"), and every believer, the ignominy of having his faith reduced to "faith." Add an exclamation point to "To be or not to be . . . " and the gloomy Dane has all the resolve he needs; add a comma, and the noble sobriety of "God save the Queen" becomes a cry of desperation bordering on double sacrilege.

Sometimes, of course, our markings may be simply a matter of aesthetics. Popping in a comma can be like slipping on the necklace that gives an outfit quiet elegance, or like catching the sound of running water that complements, as it completes, the silence of a Japanese landscape. When V.S. Naipaul, in his latest novel, writes, "He was a middle-aged man, with glasses," the first comma can seem a little precious. Yet it gives the description a spin, as well as a subtlety, that it otherwise lacks, and it shows that the glasses are not part of the middle-agedness, but something else.

Thus all these tiny scratches give us breadth and heft and depth. A world that has only periods is a world without inflections. It is a world without shade. It has a music without sharps and flats. It is a martial music. It has a jackboot rhythm. Words cannot bend and curve. A comma, by comparison, catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table.

Punctuation, then, is a matter of care. Care for words, yes, but also, and more important, for what the words imply. Only a lover notices the small things: the way the afternoon light catches the nape of a neck, or how a strand of hair slips out from behind an ear, or the way a finger curls around a cup. And no one scans a letter so closely as a lover, searching for its small print, straining to hear its nuances, its gasps, its sighs and hesitations, poring over the secret messages that lie in every cadence. The difference between "Jane (whom I adore)" and "Jane, whom I adore," and the difference between them both and "Jane -- whom I adore -- " marks all the distance between ecstasy and heartache. "No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at just the right place," in Isaac Babel's lovely words; a comma can let us hear a voice break, or a heart. Punctuation, in fact, is a labor of love. Which brings us back, in a way, to gods. 

read in In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction

Do not underestimate the cleverness of a cat

when it comes to plucking,
delicately,
the one desired item
from among many
in the trash.

Whatcha doin'?

The cat in the chair offers feedback on my writing.

She has firm opinions and never fails to offer them.

Not As Innocent As They Look

I live with sister cats whose looks are deceiving.

Yes, Doodlebug is all sweet and adorable when wakened from her nap, cuddled into her little bed.

But.

That is not the whole story.

Now imagine her jumping from the floor onto my back and holding on with her claws. Yes, this is another Doodle, the flip-side of cuddly, even though she makes that leap to purr and climb up onto my shoulders.

Those claws can do damage.

Yes, B(ad)a(ss)c(at) [pronounced Bassy] looks all sweet and adorable when wakened from her nap, comfortably lodged on her window chair.

But.

That is not the whole story.

Now imagine her ripping my expensive terrycloth robe from the hanger on the back of my bedroom door, closing said door, and spending much of the evening shredding it into pieces just for the sake of sensory pleasure, purring all the while.

Those claws can do damage.

Beware: these cats are not as innocent as they look.

What Every Sensible Cat Does on the First Cold Day Since Winter

Doodlebug abed.

A Long, Good Day

I
Another night of vomiting and diarrhea for little Cleo meant no sleep for all three of us. Another visit to the vet, this time with a fever, a bit of dehydration, and the mystery of Cleo's unbalanced gut.

When my vet came into the exam room, she said, "What happened? You got a dud?"

I laughed, just as she knew I would.

"Let her spend the day," the doctor said. "I'll have a chance to run some diagnostics and observe her."

So I did.

II
Then I drove up to Bell Buckle to see my friends F and TJ. 

Home now from hospital and rehab, TJ holds court in his "command center" (the kitchen): birds outside, Prince the semi-poodle at his feet, his wife F busy cooking or cleaning or arranging the next visit or opening mail and paying the bills, his phone in his hand. 

Desmond Tutu said, "You don't choose your family." Well, OK, your birth family, maybe, but I've spent a lifetime choosing my families and they me in the places I have lived.

These two come closest to blood relatives. Even when they're having a hard time, they make me laugh and they enjoy a dog with a ball, sun on skin, and the gift of friendship.

III
It seems that Cleo had a negative reaction to the antibiotic prescribed for last week's bout with iffy digestion. She will eat a special diet for a couple of days, laced with probiotic.

This evening, both she and her sister Doodlebug snuggled for a good long time, one on my lap, one slung over my shoulder, happy to have the Human home and each other.

IV
Love.

For better or worse.