On Cats

Exercise 4.  Write an essay entitled “On....” something.

                                  
“On Cats”

By Micheal Ward

It is a truism to say “there are dog people and there are cat people.”  I actually like dogs.  I pet them on my walks in the neighborhood, Maggie the Bassett Hound and Hoosier the black Lab.  Dogs are often friendly and eager to be fussed over.

But cats.  Oh my.  Cats are mostly standoffish, mercurial in temperament, narcissistic in the extreme.  I love cats.  Does that make me perverse?

My first cat, Agatha Christie, I found on the roof of a friend’s house on Long Island.  She was only a few months old and feral.  I said brightly, “Oh, I’ll take her home!”  So we captured her and put her in a box.  She was a nightmare in the house, shredded the furniture, peed on the Oriental rug.  I finally realized she was happiest outside, so she roamed freely during daylight hours and came into the house only to eat and sleep.  She was like having a long-term relationship with a juvenile delinquent.  One day she went off and never came back.  I told my friends she must have joined a hippie commune.

Agatha was followed by Hannah, a beautiful and thoroughly vicious Calico, who would only allow me to pet her when she was hungry.  Then came Frances, unassuming, diffident, spending years sleeping under the bed rather than on it.  After she died Tommi Faye Bakker, a mostly white cat with black splotches under his eyes, graced my life for nine years.  He weighed twenty pounds and was a total love bunny.  I could carry him around my neck like a boa, Tommi purring like an engine.  When Tommi died, I cried for days. 

And now Jack, the fifth rescue cat.  He is also black and white, only three years old, given to “night frenzies,” when I’ll hear him running hither and thither through the house and I find all the rugs askew the next morning.  He was apparently abused as a kitten and insists on initiating whatever contact we have.  I’m deeply honored when he sneaks into the bed after I’m asleep and curls up against the small of my back.  I hardly breathe, so precious is his warmth.