Three Cat Stories

Walking to work today I saw a man running across the street before the light changed. He was sporting a long red beard and a beanie and what looked like a black scarf in motion around his shoulders. But that was no scarf. It was a jet black cat with a diamond collar gripping his jacket to stay on for the ride. I tried to catch up to find out more, but they moved at a clip and disappeared around a corner. I’ve seen parrots on people’s shoulders, but not a cat like this.

I’ve had my fair share of cats over the years. One, a Russian Blue, walked out on us one day and disappeared. She didn’t even leave a note. Weeks later our neighbors two doors away, we lived in an apartment complex at the time, knocked on our door one night and said, “Did you own a Russian Blue?” I noticed right away the past tense of that question. Immediately I thought of bad news like they ran over her. “She moved into our home, we just came to tell you.”

On another occasion, another cat, this one a Siamese with an attitude, packed her bags and left the house when we adopted a second cat. She wasn’t going to have any part of it, so she walked across the street to our neighbor’s house, climbed a tree and hopped onto their roof. And there she stayed for weeks. She’d come home for food and then leave again. Fortunately for her it was summer with warm nights. As soon as the weather cooled down, we found her in our house again, curled up in front of the fireplace, without giving an explanation.

There’s something about cats that I respect. They’re really in charge even if you think you are.

Calvin says, “A bunch of rot. Cats are vermin. Good for sniffing into oblivion.”

A Little Shop of Horrors

We are a country of innovators. I passed a driving range where I saw a man in a cart with a scooper that picked up all the golf balls lying on the ground. Hundreds of them. They looked like giant hailstones on a fake green turf. And here I thought this guy would be stooping and picking these up by hand. Shows you how another generation I am. photo (90)

I marvel at the candy factory machines that cut, coat, and wrap each piece. I’m used to the tortilla making factories of life with one ball of dough being flattened out into a round circle and then placed on a conveyor belt and run through a hot oven. This is usually the job of one young girl in threadbare clothes in a village garage.

I grew up with people doing work by hand. But now we have robots making cars and pizza. And then the next step is robots flying our planes, driving our cars, and cleaning our houses. The cleaning our houses bit I like and have no qualms about that. More time for painting and writing. But at the rate these automatons are pushing out a human workforce, who’s going to be making babies in twenty-five years?

Calvin says, “Don’t worry. You won’t be around to be annoyed by the little fake people.”

beagle

Not Quite

Teddie tried not to be noticed, but he was the odd bear in the box. The rest of his siblings were white. A little boy yanked him out, inspected him, threw him on the floor and ran away. That’s when I saw Mama psycho-consumer speed by on the way to the beef jerky with her cart. Teddie saw her, too, scrambled to his feet, and hurled himself into the box like a high jumper in the Olympics. He made it just in time before he became road kill and sample meat for the food demonstrators across the aisle. His siblings were no help. He wanted to bury himself deep in the box and recuperate from his harrowing experience, but they didn’t even twitch a paw. They needed their space, they said.

Calvin says, “I would have squirmed and wiggled down to the bottom of the box and tossed a few of the white boys overboard.”