This Month's Story

I was over at Susan’s the other day and ‘casually’ mentioned that perhaps it was time she took back her cat. I quickly got a lecture from her on this “Paul, people don’t own cats, we associate with cats. Holly stays with you because he wants to stay with you. You don’t ‘own’ him.”

“Besides,” she said going to the back room and ruining her argument by bringing back a tawny colored large Siamese, “I have a new cat. Isn’t he beautiful?” With that she dropped the cat on my lap.

I started to say something about her argument and decided to give up and patted the cat while she prattled on about where she got him and about cats in general. I will admit that it was a very nice looking cat. It was overall a pale fawn with darker ears, face, and feet and clear blue eyes. I noticed, however, that it didn’t move, it just lay there on my lap where she had dropped him.

I lifted it up off my lap and put it on the floor. It now lay where I put him and continued not to move.

Susan had been watching me stare at the immobile cat, “It does that.” She said, “It doesn’t move around very much. It just sort of lays there. It’s not like Holly.”

She’s right. Holly is different.

A few days ago when I had staggered out of bed and was making my way down the hall to get some breakfast, I realized that Holly was waiting for me in ambush at the end of the hall, beside the chair.

I was barely awake and in no mood for his ‘wake up and greet the day’ bit. Stella feeds him when she gets up at five-thirty and by the time I get up at about six or six-thirty Stella is gone and I have to contend with a cat that’s wide awake and wants everyone else to be the same. In fact if I am not up by six-thirty, Holly will be on the bed making rapid two-yard sprints across the covers and me.

Now, he was waiting at the end of the hall.

As I got closer and just the second before Holly was about to spring from his ill-concealed ambush, I gave a hefty swing toward him with my right foot.

Let me explain several things very carefully now, because things begin to move very swiftly from this point on.

I am not used to kicking at cats, but even with my poor experience, I had sense enough to control in the arc of my kick to miss Holly by a minimum of six to eight inches. Knowing this, I allowed the swing to have quite a bit of momentum behind it as it proceeded to its target.

There were several factors present that bear on what happened next. One, I was half asleep. Two, I was barefoot. Three, the corner of the hallway wall intruded slightly inside the arc of my kick. It really wasn’t much of an intrusion; barely an inch, but what there was was not going to back away from that inch.

With less than a foot into the swing, my toes encountered the corner of the wall as my foot tried to proceed at full force to where Holly was crouched staring amazed at my move. I realized later that I would never have gotten near him, because when the wreck that was my foot passed where he had crouched, Holly was gone. No Siamese, he.

I stifled a soul-searing scream of pure agony, stumbled forward and fell, half on the floor and half on the couch. I twisted around and stared with horror at the rapidly swelling already bloody toes and at Holly who, having regained his composure, came surging out from behind the chair and raced across my body, up on the back of the couch, and around the corner to disappear into the bedroom.

I was left gasping, lying there with at least two broken toes, severe, seemingly nonstop, pain, and the knowledge that Holly had scored three out of a possible three points.

Stella had to come home and drive me to the various appointments I had to make during the day, telling each person we met the entire story from swing-to-fall in, what was to her, hysterical detail. Susan thought it was funny, Amy at the bank thought it was funny, even our neighbor, who I thought I liked, thought it was funny.

That night when I washed the toes off for the nth time, I saw that the swelling had gone down and wiggling the two toes very carefully I was greeted by the wondrous sight of their moving. They were still hurting, but they weren’t broken.

There is a lesson that I have learned from all this about myself, about the world in general, and even about my limitations as a person:

“Never kick at a black cat with a full swing and a bare toe.”

Think about it.