Wednesday, September 22, 2010

It's All Mice Under The Fridge

If you should happen to be caring for our cat Tater, and she starts yowling at the fridge, she's not asking for a treat. She has lost a toy mouse under there, and she would be much obliged if you got down on your hands and knees and swept underneath with a yardstick. She'll show you where the yardstick is.

This was a truth-in-advertising cat. When we first saw her at the Humane Society, she was the only animated object in a glass room full of snoozing cats. She had one arm stretched out under the door and was trying to stab herself a toy mouse a few inches out of range. We slid the mouse back under the door and she dribbled it madly through the room, occasionally lighting up a resting cat like a ball in a pinball machine.

"That one's lively," we said in approval, deeply underestimating the virtues of torpor in a cat.

I've heard that cats sleep an average of 90% of the time. Put Tater in a room with nine dead cats and we've nailed the average.

Tater is always on the move. She has a dozen fuzzy rattle-mice, a ball of feathers, a stuffed kiwi with which she has a love-disembowel relationship, a robotic bug, several golf balls and, in a pinch, stray Mentos. These she will swat and bat at until she has whacked every one of them under the fridge. It takes her about five minutes.

"We should get another dozen mice," I suggested at the beginning, but Dave pointed out that that would delay the inevitable by at most another five minutes. He dropped to his knees and fetched the yardstick.

Recently, however, she has begun to whine at the fridge even when there is nothing under there. "That's not how it works, Tater," Dave keeps trying to explain to her. "You have to put something in the bank to get something back out."

She's not getting it. She's like any other child growing up in an ATM world. When I was small I got my own passbook at the bank, and once a month Daddy and I would walk down and put in some percentage of my minuscule allowance. The teller would mark it in pen in my passbook along with the new total. I always knew how much I had in the bank, and never suspected that I could get it back out. When credit cards came out, I understood about real money. Never paid a finance charge in forty years.

This generation thinks the fridge dispenses fuzzy mice at the drop of a yardstick.

Tater's back at the fridge, yowling. It can climb up your nerves. "Potato Brewster," Dave says, highly annoyed, "there is nothing under there."


"Let me try," I say.

"Think of it like the Social Security System, Tater," I explain. "If no one is putting anything in, there is nothing to draw out." Tater does not blink. She is correctly skeptical. People are still drawing stuff out. The fact is, I don't understand it either. I take another tack.

"It's like my brain, Tater," I tried. "I spent all those years putting education in it, and over the years I've pulled out facts and ideas until now there's nothing left. If I don't put in something new, there will be nothing to withdraw. The alcohol doesn't count." Tater stared at me, then at the fridge.

"Look at me, Tater. I used to know the Krebs Cycle and I could explain the Uncertainty Principle and I could read Mme. Bovary in the original French. Now the only thing in my brain is Beer. Beer. Beer. Beer. That's it."

Tater stared at the fridge, then at me. Mouse. Mouse. Mouse. Mouse.

"Oh, what the hell," I thought, reaching for the yardstick. Maybe we'll get lucky with the fridge. I know there's a beer in there.

27 comments:

  1. LOL Murr... I can't even remember what all I've forgotten!

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  2. I try to never make the mistake of thinking I am smarter than the cat. And I don't even have one. Which make me less intelligent than an invisible cat.

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  3. She's a hyperactive cat, and you knew it before you got her! I'm amazed that she doesn't slow down and act more catlike now and then, but she's also pretty darn cute. I am mystified why you gave her a name that sounds like it would be perfect for a couch potato type kitty. I really enjoyed this, as usual.

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  4. We had a very active cat once. Much too active.

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  5. Potato is now my new favorite cat name. In fact, I may just adopt a rescue kitten just so I can name it Potato.

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  6. Get a laser pointer. "Park" the beam under the fridge each time you're done playing. "start" the beam back up under the fridge the next time you play.
    Even better, do the same thing with a little spot on the wall. Guests get curious when they see one of our four cats sitting with their nose 3 inches from the wall meowing plaintively...

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  7. We've got a laser pointer, but I never thought about parking it under the fridge. It does give us a little rest. Sometimes when he can't think of any other way to play, Dave stampedes the cat through the house. It's very loud. The only thing that ever wore her out was the bat that got into the house. That had me on the floor, too.

    The two cats we've had (serially) were both named in advance by Dave. The first one was Larry and I thought the second one should have been Wally. And Tater is SUCH a Wally.

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  8. Tater reminds me so much of our beloved Bodil that I'm not sure what my reaction to meeting her next week will be: joy or a puddle of tears. Bodil had a succession of stuffed ducks with which she had a love-disembowel relationship, and the last one, Smacky, is buried with her. (In the back yard, not under the fridge.)

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  9. I know something that would slow Tater down--that is, if you really wanted her slowed down. A dog. A hyperactive cat chasing dog.
    We have a cat that loves to chase little furry mice and batty balls, etc. That is, until we got THE NEW DOG. New dog looks at cat and says--wanna play chase? Only, new dog asks AFTER she has treed Allie cat. You know how she asks, of course, tail wagging, grinning from ear-to-ear with her come hither I eat you look.
    Allie is now a very staid calm sleeping cat.

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  10. Multiple your Tater by three and you will have our maniacal tripli-cats. There is always something under our fridge...

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  11. Has anyone thought of screening off the area under the fridge, so that nothing fits under there, but air flow is still allowed? Or is that just a buzz kill?

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  12. I'm trying to decide whether hyper cat would be an improvement on the model we have or not. We have a rescue cat from a no-kill shelter who gets overstimulated if you pat her and then goes demento and defoliates the plants. She also, er, voids for any reason whatsoever and sometimes none at all that the non feline brain can decipher. Seven long years of it. Yep, on the whole, I think hyper cat sounds like a few models up from the one we have, Murr.

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  13. LOL! Charming story. I can so relate. Except when Mason is stalking the refrigerator it means there is an actual live mouse under there which he just considers a great interactive toy. When they die from exhaustion he brings them to me to "fix." Lovely...

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  14. Dawson and Tess wish you were their Mom, and would put cute little fuzzy things near them so they could baat them under the fridge. Then when big boy waving stick lands on his knees and wiggles his butt in the air, all in the name of retrieval, they too would chucklleemmmeooww.

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  15. Black cats are the best. We've had at least one for the thirty years we've been married. Two, at the moment. Ours are typical cats, though: half the speed of light, or absolute zero.

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  16. That is one gorgeous cat. And she has you trained so well!

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  17. I need to correct Bill. Black and white cats are the best. We've had three and they were the best cats in the world. Except for Cherokee, the Maine Coon Cat, who was fabulous. There was Nahja, too, the red cat, who was totally so incredible. Piper, the Siamese, was fluent in many languages, and used them all constantly. Phaedra was my first cat. She tackled a slow moving, soundless VW bug, and she's buried in Minneapolis. When I go back, I visit her. But my point? Black is also good. Great, actually.

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  18. The very very best are tortoiseshells, like Larry. I can say that because Tater does not read my blog. She isn't interested in it, because it does not fit under the refrigerator.

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  19. I couldn't read Mme. Bovary in English.

    Now I'm depressed.

    I need a drink.

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  20. Your Tater sounds like the long-lost littermate of our Yoda. (Well, my boyfriend and I call him "ours"....he actually belongs to our landlord but let's be honest, he likes us better.) Yoda's a bit more pointy, but is all black with those (almost-)scornful green eyes, too. And he's a yeller.

    Due to somebody's harebrained idea to put up a cat fence and let Yoda and his sister out in the back yard, he has no shortage of living playthings (groan), though he also has no reservations about making bits of trash, laser beams, rubber bands, pieces of his imagination, etc. into toys as well.

    BUT Old Yeller redeemed himself the other day when fishing under the couch for who-knows-what. After much muttering and wiggling his arm around, he extracted, with his claws in the wrapper, a Lindt chocolate ball in, well, mint condition. Lord knows how it got there (our housemates are vegans.) We had to wrest it from his clutches because, wrapped in shiny tinfoil, it was of course a most excellent plaything. Who knows--maybe Tater is trying to tell you that there's something truly awesome under there.

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  21. Our cat Angelina was the serious type, hardly every played. But she was an excellent listener and would keep you company regardless of what you had to say. I am sure she had her own opinions but she generally kept them to herself.

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  22. Snap! Somehow we've morphed Tater into two separate cats, but I'm sure they'll combine again when it's time for her to go home!

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  23. Has anyone thought of screening off the area under the fridge, so that nothing fits under there, but air flow is still allowed? Or is that just a buzz kill?

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  24. I try to never make the mistake of thinking I am smarter than the cat. And I don't even have one. Which make me less intelligent than an invisible cat.

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