Cats Own Us

He usually does this when to food bowl on the front porch needs refilling, or if it is full but not presented properly as one piece is not aligned with the others, or if the sun is shining, cloudy, raining, or if it is Wednesday give or take three days. He was a gift from our youngest son, Tristan, when he relocated to another apartment. He told us it was an expression of his love and devotion for us but I suspect he just thought that we were losing our hearing due to our age and wouldn’t notice the noise….. We noticed.

Do you see a pattern here? Our house is the dumping station for our offspring’s felines that have turned into weird cats. I think their logic is that their father and mother are weird, so we wouldn’t notice the feline schizophrenia. That actually works as I stated at the beginning, I love cats. I wish that was true of Angie. She tolerates the cats because she loves me. At least that is what I am assuming. Of course, I also assume the cats love me also. I too, live in my own little world.

Throughout the years we have been home to some interesting cat personalities as was the case with the large black and white long haired cat that a customer of mine gave us. He was a friendly cat. He would spend most of his time hanging out in the front yard and was always good for an occasional petting or back scratching session. He developed a bad and eventually fatal habit of sleeping on top of the dual rear tires of my work truck.

One hot summer we were all away on vacation at the family cabin in Oregon and we had left our house and its four legged menagerie in the care of  our friend’s teenage daughter, Michelle. When we returned home I found a large note taped to the front door that said:

“Derek, call me as soon as you get this! Michelle”

When I called her she explained that tragedy had struck when we were gone. She said that about a week ago she heard Dave, one of our employees, come over to take my truck to work and when she came out a few minutes later she found the cat dead, laying on the driveway. I assured her that she was not to worry about it as the cat obviously had spent the previous evening in the company of the local female feline floozies that plagued our neighborhood and most likely was sleeping off a long night of catnip, whiskey and wild, wild women when his poor choice of sleeping quarters caught up with him. I asked her what she did with the body and she said:

“Oh, I put it in a box in the garage.”

“Great”, I thought to myself, “it’s been over 100 degrees all week!”

I was not prepared for the exquisite odor that met me when I entered the garage. It knocked me back out the door but I took a deep breath and forged ahead. As I looked around through my watering eyes in the garage that was filled with boxes of Angie’s now very aromatic treasures I realized that I should have asked for more details as to the location of the flattened cat’s impromptu coffin. I followed the stench trail and finally noticed a fluffy black tail sticking out of one of the old oak antique milk crates we got at a yard sale last year. Due to the heat the cat had apparently melted and had become one with the crate so I took the whole stinky thing out and put it in the back of my truck. I informed Angie about the sad affair and told her I needed to run over to the shop to dispose of the remains before the kids saw or smelled it. I put the box into the dumpster and headed home to help unload the van.

The next day, Conrad, another of our dear family friends who happened to also have his shop in the same complex as mine, came over to tell me about some moron who put a melted cat in this beautiful old oak milk crate in the dumpster.

Another of the many cats that blessed us with their presence was Dracula, a male Siamese that had severe mother separation issues. He would get into the children’s beds after they were asleep and suckle on their necks leaving little “cat hickies” This led to several intense phone calls from the parents of the kid’s friends who would spend the night only to fall victim to “Dracula” the phantom neck sucker.

During Dracula’s reign of terror, bedtime at our home was always signaled by Ashley, who was then 6 years old at the time, bursting into melodramatic anguish at the first mention of having to go to bed.  At the first cry of despair Dracula would run off into the living room and hide under the furniture to await his prey on their way to their bedrooms. He would run out from his hiding places to attack the tasty little ankles going by. The kids would cower in the hallway waiting to make the mad dash through the living room of death. They would grab pillows or books to fend off the attack and they resembled a group of sadly deformed spin bifida victims shuffling across the room while franticly waving random household items around their feet.