I have cats. We have great fun in my house, watching
my cats cavort
through the house, getting into the mischief
cats will get into. Great fun.
In fact, if we have any more fun, I’m going
to snap.
You see, I don’t have cute little kitties like
the ones in Puss ‘n Boots.
I have cats from the Fifth Circle of Hell. I
have Axis of Evil cats.
Osama Bin Laden fears my cats.
They overturn the garbage can and spread the contents
around the
kitchen floor so they can decide whether they
want to eat the leftover
hummus or just play bocci with the avocado shells.
They knock framed pictures off the shelves. Those
are pictures of beloved
members of my family. (At least I think they
are. I know I’ve seen some of
those faces at family reunions. Others are in
black and white and look like
they are not from this century, but that’s okay,
too because we honor and
value our ancestors. Also, they may have left
me money.)
But back to my cats. (Though quite frankly you
should never, ever turn
your back on my cats. If you ever come to my
house for dinner, for
pete’s sake remember that because I don’t have
third-party insurance.)
We can’t even keep toilet paper on the roll anymore
because Foster
invariably spins the entire roll onto the floor.
I watch him watching me as I replace the toilet
paper roll. Then
seconds after I’ve left the room I hear the spinning.
By the time I get
back to the bathroom, Foster has arranged the
whole mound of paper into
a fluffy cat bed and is peering out at me from
amongst the ruffles of
paper like a lion on the Serengeti.
Badness got her head stuck in a box of Kleenex
the other day (in
addition to being reckless, Badness is not very
bright) and by the time
we got to her to extract her head from the box,
she’d knocked over the
lamp, two tables and my sister.
Shiloh has a funny little game he plays that involves
sitting on my desk and
stretching as far as he can until he knocks every
item on my desk one by
one onto the floor. If an item perchance escapes
his stretch, he bats it along
the table an inch at a time until -- whap --
over the edge it goes.
Now here’s the annoying part: as he’s doing this
he is -- I swear --
smiling at me.
A friend called the other day, and right in the
middle of his sentence
I had to interrupt him.
“Talk fast,” I said. “The cats are eating the phone wire.”
I always thought this was normal cat behavior,
until during a recent
trip to Atlanta, I met my friend Jean-Pierre
for dinner, and met his cats.
I noticed one thing right off the bat: His cats were nothing like my cats.
His cats patter around the house on their little
cat feet. They never
jump up on the counter or knock things down.
And the whole time I was
there I did not witness one cat going to the
bathroom in the tub.
I don’t know how his cats got that way. For all
I know Jean-Pierre and
his wife Alicia beat them daily with extension
cords throughout their
adolescence, which is not recommended by the
ASPCA as acceptable
cat disciplinary technique.
But as the endless argument goes regarding criminals,
serial killers
and other despots, is the problem with my cats
genetic or environmental?
I’ve tried to provide them with a stable upbringing.
I got them all their shots
and physicals, offered them unconditional love
and never spanked them,
and praised them when they brought good grades
home from school.
On the other hand, I got them as kittens from
my mother, whose idea of
discipline when my sister was a toddler and did
something wrong was to
say, “My honey can do anything she wants” and
whap me in the arm for
scolding her.
I was going to send the cats to Scared Straight,
but was told they don’t
accept cats, so I’ve got another idea.
What I’m proposing is a Kitty Exchange Program,
where wild, uncivilized
cats such as mine spend a month with genteel,
lady-like cats like Jean-Pierre’s.
Maybe by spending some time with them, my cats
will learn some manners.
Of course, they may teach Jean-Pierre’s cats
to smoke but you can’t make
an omelette without breaking eggs. Any cook will
tell you that.
Until my Exchange Program idea gets off the ground
I’m trying different
things to see if anything will calm my cats down.
We try to play with them a good deal in the evenings
to get the
rambunctiousness out of their systems.
I’ve switched their food to one of those fancy,
jet-fueled brands that
claims to whiten their teeth, soften their fur,
and improve their SAT
scores by at least 100 points.
And my sister has taken to gathering each of them
gently into her arms
every night at bedtime...and spinning them around
30 or 40 times until
they are too dizzy to stand up.
All of which has yielded startling results and
has left us with one burning
question when we wake up in the morning: “Who
keeps barfing in the cat dish?”