vituperation

January 12, 2003

Many thanks to readers Teresa and Tammie for their contributions ($3 and $3) to the Huntsville Animal Shelter; they are most appreciated.

Damn.

Why men don’t understand women, reason #4,287: I was sharply rebuked yesterday and had my genitalia endangered by my wife, who was chasing me around flicking a lighter at my crotch for my having had the unmitigated gall to use the dishcloth in the kitchen sink to wash some dishes.

Sure, you women out there probably think the trail of egg pieces she left across the counter when she wiped up some water with the cloth had something to do with the threat to my manhood, but that’s just because y’all stick together.

Watching the birds while daddy writes his entry.

Often on Sunday mornings, I sleep in until 5:30 - and sometimes as late as 6:00 - before getting up. Most Sundays, I do a very light workout, walking and jogging through my neighborhood but not pushing myself nearly as hard as I do the other six days of the week. After this, I check the news sites to make sure the world didn’t end during the night and, more often than not, head upstairs to take a long bath and read until around 8:00.

This morning was one such morning, and I grabbed a Diet Coke - I’d already had about a quart of water and didn’t want any more of that - and headed upstairs to draw my bath. On my way to the bathroom I picked up my current stack of books and some clean clothes for after my shower.

Why yes, I do take a bath and then a shower. Everyone knows you can’t get clean from a bath alone, just look at a kid sometime.

Close your mail client, please.

I settled back into the swirling water with a book on writing and read for a few minutes. Absently, I reached over with my left hand and cracked the tab on the Diet Coke. Tubby, who’d been sitting like a meatloaf on the floor next to the tub, anxiously guarding the cat food from anyone who came near it with harmful intent, popped straight up like a cork from a champagne bottle, rising so high the pads of his feet were fully six inches above the edge of the tub. He twisted wildly in the air like a flag in a strong breeze.

When he landed, he cast a single baleful glare at me over his shoulder as I hooted in the tub.

About six months ago, my mom and stepdad’s cat Scooter vanished without a trace. He left the house one morning and never returned. A couple of weeks later two dens of coyotes were discovered in some nearby woods and the current theory is that Scooter had a fatal encounter with one.

My parents were shattered; they loved that cat as much as they’d have loved a child. My stepfather said he didn’t want to ever get another cat, because losing one hurt so much. After almost a month he relented, and they got a new cat, whom they named Greystone.

Greystone was a fighter, always ready to wrestle with you on the floor and bite on your hand when you squeezed his belly. He was also very loving, always ready to flop down in your lap and be rubbed. We had loads of fun with Greystone every time we visited.

Here he is, at this past Christmas:

On the Friday that was ten days ago my parents were out walking in their neighborhood. My mom spotted a small tan shape lying in the gutter ahead of them.

"I hope that isn’t Greystone," she said.

It was. He’d apparently just been hit by a car moments before. My parents gathered their baby up - they’d only had him five months, and he was only about seven months old - and took him home. This time, they both said they’d never get another cat and my mom offered to give us all their kitty supplies. I told her to hang onto them until the hardest part of the grief passed. My sister and I both advised them to get another cat, because the joy a pet brings far outweighs the grief of losing one.

My sister went so far as to call the vet she uses, one way out in the country up near the Tennessee border. People bring barn cats in there all the time and leave them, you see. The vet checks them out and makes sure they’re healthy, then adopts them out for next to nothing. The vet’s office told my sister they had two cats, a female kitten and a male about five months old.

After much discussion, my parents visited the vet this past Friday. The female kitten was a wild thing, grabbing and biting my mother’s arm right away, only mean instead of playfully. They asked to see the male cat.

They both burst into tears when he was brought in, but they took him home. I think it’s meant to be.

They call him Bandit, and I went to see him yesterday: