This Month's Story

(Originally published in 2009)

I have written in the past of the many amazing (to me) attributes of Holly, our black cat; his remarkable agility to climb great heights and leap large spaces, the complete darkness of his blackness, his ethereally aloofness and his complete disdain of worldly contacts except of his own choosing.

Other cat owners have told me that these are normal rather than abnormal traits. I don’t believe this. I feel that Holly is somehow exceptional, a sort of lion’s lion in the world of cats. However, I have found that Holly is flawed in the one attribute that up till now I expected all cats to have, that is a respectable “meow”, an audible “meow”, a “meow” you can hear from at least a mouse leap away, a “meow” that proclaims to all that hear it that here is a cat!

I think that that is a reasonable assumption and don’t feel that I am expecting any gargantuan effort on Holly’s part to give it to me. Holly and I have had our small differences it’s true, but there are times when I feel proud of him and, when he walks into a room, I want people to sit up and know he is there.

So, shortly after we got Holly, I was completely surprised to find that such a “meow” in Holly’s case is not possible.

If he has a “meow” it is definitely defective. The only noise I hear from him is a mixture of sound that resembles the squeak of a distant screen door and the noise made by someone in the next office turning in their swivel chair. If a “meow” is there, it’s not what one would reasonably expect. What I hear comes out as a rather startling:

Mew!

Now I know that this may not seem important. Certainly not as earth shaking news such as the eventual ending of the universe, the realization that the sun is raising the earth’s temperature one tenth of a degree Celsius each year or the fact they haven’t found Jimmy Hoffa’s body. But it does bother me.

Stella, on the other hand, thinks the diminutive squeak that Holly makes is cute.

She claims that I am making a big to do over nothing and has pointed out to me a number of things I should be tending to besides Holly’s bark, finding out what that shudder is when the car goes over seventy-five, why the weeds are so prolific in front of the Gazebo, my not putting the deodorant back in the center of the bathroom counter after I use it.

So when Holly lets out one of his diminutive pips to tell us he’s hungry I take great glee in telling Stella that she should pay no attention to him.

“Heck, something makes a noise like that. What can he do? Throw a fur ball at you?”

However, I did notice her shudder early this last Sunday morning when Holly walked in the room at five-thirty and wrecked havoc on any hopes Stella had of sleeping late at least one day in the week. Holly announced his presence with his usual:

Mew!

Now if it was daylight and we were outside in the open air, it would have been different. Outside, what with the wind, the sounds of the birds, heck, even the noise of growing grass, we would have heard nothing. But in the early morning stillness of our bedroom, Holly’s Mew! was clearly audible.

Let me point out that at night, Holly normally stays in the kitchen, patrolling that part of the house that in these hours is completely his to rule. However, there are times he wanders out to to join Stella and I in our bedroom. The problem when he does this is that at these times he is wide-awake and wants amusement and we are fast asleep and don’t. So at night, the kitchen door is usually closed tight and Holly wandering is limited.

Sunday, the door had not been well secured and Holly, awake and bored, had come to call. First the Mew! Then silence. Both Stella and I heard it and lay there waiting. Nothing happened. Then just before we began falling back asleep, there was a plump of a body landing on the bed, then a black form leaping from one of our bodies to the other and then nothing.

“Paul! Get up and get him!”

“You get him!”

There was long stretch of silence. Then a Mew! beside my side of the bed. As I lounged to grab him, Holly leapt again onto the bed, did his body-to-body jump, and then tried to leap off again.

Holly was quick, but not quick enough. Stella grabbed him before he could leap down, and I felt the bed shift as she got up. Then, after a moment, I heard in the distance, the kitchen door slam shut and then felt the bed shift again as Stella returned. There was a momentary turning and shifting of covers on both our parts and then a return to quiet.

In this silence, I slipped into a soft, seamless sleep. There was some passage of time and then I found myself being drawn back a rather delightful dream into being again half awake. It took a second to sense what had awoken me. There was, I realized, a light weight on my leg. Not actually on my leg, beside it. It was outside the covers, in the space between Stella and me.

Stella had not checked the other kitchen door.

I listened. There was no Mew! this time, but then there was not really complete silence, either. I found that I can feel more than hear a low, barely audible, purr. I lay there waiting. Nothing more happened. Just the weight against my leg and the low purr. I realized that I could sleep with that and relaxing, let myself slip back to the dreams I had left a few moments earlier.

It’s not often one gets to sleep with a lion.