There were cat prints all over the windshield of my van this morning. Paw prints going up on the driver's side, slide marks going down on the passenger side. Apparently Morning, our tuxedo cat, was climbing up on the roof of the van and slaloming down for his evening entertainment, what time he wasn't sleeping in the back seat on Dennis's sweater and weaving his fur into it.
He had been consigned to the garage for the night because he was galloping up and down the hall, pounding on closet doors and jumping up, down, and across the bed at two in the morning while we were trying to sleep, meowing to try to get our attention. He got mine. I threw him into the garage as soon as I could catch him. ( Oh, don't go all PETA on me! I leave the car window down so he can sleep in there when he's finished skiing on the windshield.)
Carl Sandburg, who wrote "The fog comes in on little cat feet...", obviously never owned a cat. Sandburg was going for softness and silence. When a cat barrels down the hall it sounds like nine horses in the fifth at Kentucky Downs. It is magnified at night. A cat's life is twenty hours sleeping, one hour eating and grooming himself, and three hours wreaking havoc.
Before we became Politically Correct we let a cat we owned have kittens. It's possible there is nothing in this world cuter than a teeny kitten. They literally bounce into the air when they are jumping around chasing wadded up pieces of paper or strings or each other. They can fit into anything, like in Dennis's dress shoes. They are quickly litter-trained, but before that they may make an occasional mistake, like in Dennis's dress shoes. That made for some unpleasant rides to work in the winter with the heater going!
I swear I wasn't really retaliating for the shoe incident when I almost killed those kittens. It was simple human error! This was before self-cleaning ovens. I read that you could clean an oven by stuffing all the vent holes with dish towels and leaving a bowl of ammonia inside the oven for several hours. There was no mention of the fact that if you don't get the vents completely closed off and you leave the house shut up with kittens inside all day with ammonia in the oven that the kittens might be overcome! We did get home from work in time to rescue them but it was kind of a close call.
Now, I certainly don't believe in reincarnation but cats do have nine lives, they say, and they live a long time (unless overcome by ammonia) like into the teens, so while I don't have any basis for this, I'm wondering if the latest cats we have had may somehow be getting back at us for that unfortunate ammonia thing.
The grand kids gave Dennis two kittens, brothers, for his birthday a few years ago. They were darling to begin with and just wanted to cuddle, but they swiftly turned into the cats from hell. Midnight (Dennis named them. Don't blame me.) liked to be up high, the better to look down on you and plot his next move. He would manage to leap from the floor to the chair to the top of the bookcases and walk back and forth till he had displaced every decorative object up there, then he would sprawl out and take his nap, frequent naps being required of cats but only in the daytime. The bookcases form an L on the wall at the corner and there is about a twelve inch square opening between them. Soon after we got the kittens Midnight completed his high jump and tumbled right down between the bookcases six feet to the floor. I considered leaving him there but the howling was rising to a crescendo that was going to disturb the neighbors. And the grandkids might have noticed.
I made a desperate phone call and Robyn came to our rescue. While I was preparing to remove all seventy-two linear feet of books prior to pulling out the bookcases Robyn attached some scarves to a basket handle, climbed onto a chair and lowered the basket with a cat treat for bait in it down the hole and gently pulled up the cat. I knew that girl was smart!
Dennis wanted to put them in the garage at night so we could get some sleep but I was more tender-hearted. We compromised by getting a sweet little cat bed and shutting them in the laundry room/pantry. They thanked us by climbing the pantry shelves and knocking down as many cereal boxes as they could and drop-kicking several glass bowls that were on the very top shelf.
From that experience I learned to tightly cover anything left in the pantry overnight, especially the cat food, but when I was gone for a week baby-sitting our Edmond grand kids, Dennis didn't think about the cover. In the morning when he went in to retrieve the kittens they had knocked over not only the whole container of cat food but also their water dish making a slushy mess. Dennis, who really wasn't the one who had put the ammonia in the oven, slipped, slid and fell, breaking his leg in three places and, home alone, had to crawl through the house to even reach a telephone to call for help. This, dear readers, is why he walks with a limp to this day.
I may be doing penance for the ammonia thing but I'm not too soft-hearted to put him in the garage any more.
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