Got-Choo!

One of the things about our cat Tater, see, is that she is going to make do with just the one life, the other eight being redundant, but it should be a barn-burner. There's nothing about her that smacks of frailty. She's big and shiny and hasn't so much as hacked up a hairball in her entire life--she's somewhere north of twelve now--and every time we look at her, we think: that, there, is one healthy bag of pudding. Following our house policy, a copy of which I'm sure we shared with her early on, she's going to cost us next to nothing. Store kibble and the occasional plush toy is going to cover the bill. We've had three pets in forty years and haven't seen the same vet twice, because they start their careers and retire before we come back.

It's possible that means we might have skimped on vaccinations and dental care, but everyone seemed happy enough. Larry did require a dose of spendy radiation that one time, and the car ride home was quite the event featuring the Devil's Own Radioactive Diarrhea in a crate and don't let anybody tell you you can't do the speed limit on the freeway with your entire head out the window, but she made it to seventeen. Boomer made it to 16-1/2. Tater will outlive us all. We're trying to figure out how to smuggle her essence into Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

She's such a font of fine fettle that I have been moved to comment on it despite superstition. "Tater's going to live forever," said I, heedless. And we've all seen the Hallmark shows and know what happened next. The sneeze.

Only not the adorable kitten sneeze you might expect. This is Tater. This was a five-sneeze drencher.  It pinned our ears back. Rippled the curtains. The sun cast rainbows on the far wall. Well then.

So that's interesting, I thought, I wonder what sort of dust particle she got into. Was it the Higgs boson? It was concerning, but only briefly. Then she sneezed again. And off and on all day and night. And the next day. "If you're still sneezing on Monday," I warned her, "You're going in the crate." Tater does not care for the crate.

Meanwhile I did a modicum of research and thanks to the gol-durned oversharing Internet I discovered that cats do get colds and upper respiratory infections from other cats, but I discounted that on account of Tater is the queen and sole fur-bearing occupant of this house and isn't allowed to roam outside. And I further discovered that an upper respiratory infection could also indicate heart failure, feline leukemia, dropsy, the grippe, conspicuous consumption, pox, and hoof-and-mouth disease (rare). 

And I was sore afraid. We began to examine her looking for signs of generalized moroseness but it's hard to tell if a cat that sleeps 80% of the time anyway is feeling peaked. By Monday I had decided she did look a little off, although that was as far as I could take it, and I made an appointment for the next afternoon, gave her the same warning about the crate, and hoped she'd straighten up beforehand.

The next day she was still sneezing. We jammed her into the crate butt first, which is how you turn a bag of pudding into a Ninja throwing star in one second, and we hove off to the vet's after double-checking the directions. The vet extracted her from the crate, took her temperature, looked in her ears, eyes, nose, and throat, probed her kidneys ("quite smooth," he said approvingly), prodded at the state of the pudding, and announced that had we not said she'd been sneezing, he would have proclaimed her the healthiest dang cat he'd seen all year.

"And she's down a pound since the last time, but that's not worrisome," he said, and I said "Well, we haven't been here for eight years," and he said "No, you were here two years ago." We were? What for? He glanced at his paper. "Sneezing," he said.

Then he opened up the crate, she strolled inside, he closed it, we paid sixty dollars, we went home, and Tater never sneezed again.

But as she points out, her eyes half-shut but bright, sixty bucks does prove we care.

Creature Comfort

It occurs to me that part of the genius of Nature is that it is all about comfort. At any given time, anything you're likely to see in the natural world is comfortable, or otherwise it would be somewhere else. Every living thing seeks its own comfort. It's not precisely the word ecologists use, but it's what they mean.

We're not talking about cats, here. Really doesn't matter where they are. They are going to be comfortable wherever they land and make it seem like a matter of policy. It's not really a policy. It has more to do with the fact that, with the exception of the big bone in their heads they use to keep their eyes lined up, they are entirely filled with pudding. They could sink all the way to the bottom of a bed of nails and emerge yawning and unspindled.

So cats have sort of punched their own ticket, comfort-wise, which is why the invasive little suckers act like they belong anywhere they roll up, including under my bird feeder, even though they totally do not. But we're talking about other living things that, in the course of their perambulations, are going to follow a comfort gradient to the cushiest available niche. I started thinking about it when my fellow frog-wrangler Karen kept finding salamanders, magnificent migrating salamanders, and I didn't. What was her secret?

"I look for them in the cracks of the pavement," she said. Oh! We're trying to rescue frogs and other amphibians as they cross the road, which they will do as long as it's wet. But evidently the salamanders pause when they come across a fissure in the asphalt, and maybe they slide right in, and it's probably just that much damper in there, and the sides of the crevice feel all cozy and nice, and they hang out a while. It's soothing to imagine all the imperfections of the pavement mortared up by comfortable salamanders. Except for that traffic thing.

But comfort is not limited to salamanders. Here in the Pacific Northwest, it's hard to find a surface that hasn't been colonized by beauty. Lichens will appear in any likely spot that has a modicum of moisture and light. Then they'll get even more comfortable by secreting acids that crumble up the surface just an eensy bit, and settle in like a dude molding his butt in a bean bag chair. And if it's not too sunny and not too dry, any random moss spore that happens by will snug its butt in right on top of the lichens. And as the mosses grow and parts of them disintegrate, they decompose into a nice spongy soil. And then regular plants stick a toe in and say aaaah. You can look at just about any tree-crotch in Portland and discover an entire miniature forest made up of comfortable things, just enjoying their Goldilocks moment.

That's why I'm here too. I rattled into this little fissure of the world and stayed put. I'm comfortable in the dear damp and the fertile gloom of our close grey skies, a place where the forecast "intermittent sunshine" refers to July. Where our star is modest and polite, asks if this is a good time before barging in, keeps its music low. If it means I have to let moss set up camp on my northern flanks, it's worth it.

A Cat-Shaped Bag

The older my thoughts get, the more free rein I give them. I figure they've earned a little trust. I have as many as I ever did, but they're harder to keep track of. Sometimes I let them out first thing in the morning and they're not back by dinnertime. And by the time they come straggling in all slouchy, I ask them where they've been, and they say "Out," and I ask them what they were doing, and they're all "Nothing." I don't know what you're supposed to do about things like that, but it's not like there's any pinning them down, at their age. I've learned not to count on remembering my thoughts as they traipse through. Sometimes I write little notes on their underwear tags so I can make sure to get them back, but it's no guarantee I'll be able to recognize them later. I have a note here on the back of an envelope that says--I think--nostril movements nonregime butter Mr. Happy, although I have truly horrible handwriting, and I can't be sure.

I do trust that all my thoughts are still in the general vicinity even if I can't find them at the moment. It might not be true, because if they're gone for good I'll never know. But I don't want to contemplate the other possibility. Some of them no doubt are gone for good. I had some teenage ones that went missing decades ago, when I was reading a lot about Zen, and seeking a spiritual path. When they put one of them on the milk carton and do an age-progression, it just says "Have another beer."

That used to be a thing I'd think about, the possibility of achieving an enlightened state of not-thinking, and I've achieved that state admirably, albeit in front of the TV with a cat on my lap. Tater is a cat of capacious and sprawly fur. Some people think she's a little fat but I don't. I think she just needs a certain ampleness of skin to hold all the guts and personality and purr in, and she sees no point in skimping on the containment vessel. You can move it all around. You can rumple up a section on her back and slump it over her ears if you want. Her fur is basically a big relaxed bag that is essentially cat-shaped but can be arranged any number of ways. She's not particular. She has every confidence that everything she needs to be a cat is somewhere inside.

That's what I think about my mind, too. It's gotten sprawly and the elastic is sprung, but all the thoughts are in there somewhere in a cat-shaped bag and you can find them if you just rumple it right.

And that's the kind of thought that comes straggling home if you give it free rein.

Save The Gerbils

By the time you've had a cat for seven years, you like to think you've got her sized up, and understand her motivations and her predilections, and are only left with the occasional isolated query, such as "does that belong to you?" and "where are you going with that?" and "is that what we do with Mommy's slippers?" But like any beings sharing a confined space, you have developed an understanding.

For instance, the first cat, (Saint) Larry, was nothing like the current occupant, Tater. Larry was the very best kitty she could be except for the pooping thing, and Tater is the very best kitty she can be, apparently, within the constraints of her own nature. But they were very differently motivated.

Larry liked to eat. And by the time we'd taught her to shake hands and roll over and a few other things she learned to do for tidbits, she had tidbitted up to a sort of tortoiseshell football shape perched on dainty little feet. Visitors took to calling her "fat cat" but I thought it was slanderous, until the day I noticed that when she rolled over on command, parts of her just kept rolling. She'd get fish flakes and kibbles and a tiny portion of wet food and completely lose control if we had chicken for dinner, which drove her to petty crime.

Tater, on the other hand, does not give one shiny shit about food. She wants her maintenance half cup of kibble every day to top up the tank, but nothing else interests her at all. All she wants to do is play. All. She used to fetch those little fuzzy plush mice, and that was terrific, because I could play from my chair, but then she quit bringing them back. Dave rigged up a green mouse on fishing line and that's her very favorite game. Every day she goes and sits by the closet that the green mouse is in and acts pitiful until he comes out. She interprets every human activity, from napping to quilting to working on taxes, as a sure sign we're ready to play too.

So when the woman who was looking in on her in our absence reported "I think she's bored," we were struck by dread. We imagined coming home to a house with all paper items spindled or serrated, and a lot of progress on her ongoing Gravity Project, wherein every household item is relocated to the lowest possible point. It's been a passion of Tater's for years, and she's grown accustomed to the noise.

So while Larry had no toys at all, Tater has a whole box of them. All of them, balls and mice and feathered doo-dads, are battered and flayed. When all the fuzzy mice start to look like mummified thumbs, Dave brings home a new set. He's calm about it. He's like the conductor of the cattle car heading to Auschwitz. It's not going to go well for the new mice.

The other day Dave came back with a new toy for Tater. It was a little stuffed gerbilly fellow, and he just had a good feeling about it. I had a bad feeling about it. She already has a stuffed kiwi bird, and she takes that out for a good disemboweling from time to time, after which I gather up and re-stuff the polystyrene guts and sew the bird back up, which always makes me feel like one of those evil dudes who re-creates virgins for a paying clientele. Tater ignored the gerbil.

But then one day Dave was taking a nap, or "watching golf," as he calls it, and I had stepped outside, and within seconds I started hearing this mournful low howl, rroowwWWRRrrooowwWWRRRrow, which sounded like a cat but certainly not our cat, who has a high squeaky voice. I was alarmed. I figured Tater had cornered something I didn't want to know about, or she had pulled the refrigerator over and pinned herself, or something, and I ran inside to find her cradling her gerbil. She instantly strolled away and emitted a normal squeak.

Now we hear the mournful low howl at least once a day, always accompanied by a surreptitious relocation of the gerbil, who remains unmarred. If you toss the gerbil, she does not run after it, but waits until we're not looking and removes it to a different room. Obviously she cares deeply about the little fellow.

I think it's ridiculous, having such strong protective feelings about a stuffed animal. Pootie thinks it's stupid too, but then again he thinks cats in general are stupid.

The Resurrection Of Larry

Larry, my old tortoiseshell cat, my first cat, has an entire ventricle of my heart all to herself, and she's got it all set up with the comfy chair and fluffy quilt and gas heat and the whole nine yards. That cat got most of my love, and when people were being difficult she got all of it, and then she went and died on me after only seventeen years, in defiance of our previous agreement. After a couple years we picked up the Tater cat, and she has several fine qualities--four, if you include her affectionate teeth, which I don't. Tater's just a fine and sturdy cat, but she has never had the same effect on me as Larry does, even in memory, now that the details of her personal hygiene are fading.

I don't mind telling you this, because Tater doesn't read my blog. She's been featured in it, but she never reads it. Her tastes run more to mouse mysteries and adventure. She does like to apply asshole prints to my manuscripts, but I'm not so sensitive as to consider that an opinion. Larry, on the other hand, would totally have read my blog if I'd had one.

So Dave and I were out walking in the neighborhood the other day and suddenly, here comes this little tortoiseshell kitty from a house a half-block away at full gallop, straight at me like an arrow from a bow, and skids to a halt at my feet. We looked at each other. "Larry?" I said, tentatively, and she flops over to show me that freckledy belly I so adored. We hug. We kiss. One of us gets a belly-rub. Then I tell her we have to be going, and she sits down, and we walk away, and a block later (I looked) she was still sitting and looking at me.

A week later I found an excuse to swing by again, and the house she shot out of was vacant, a For Rent sign in the yard. Well, that's Larry all over: just cuts out on you, after only seventeen years.

Most of my friends believe in something. Some have met ghosts, some have lucky numbers, some hope for reincarnation, some herd coincidences until they corral them into significance, some believe in the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. A large number aspire to eternity in the form of a vaporous spiritual miasma. Almost all would insist that my dearly departed Larry has reassured me that she lives still. I don't know. I'm not really constituted that way.

But I'm sure glad she dropped by.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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.

The Dog's Lunch

Dave has an affinity for terriers, and they look good on him. So when Mary Ann got her new dog Cooper, a pound mutt, we took lots of pictures. This is her first terrier.

Cooper will actually let Mary Ann get some work done. Her previous two dogs borrowed heavily from the border-collie genome, and tended to last about three minutes on a "stay" before they reminded her that it had been about three minutes since she taught them anything. Consequently they both knew several thousand different things to do, fetch, slide down, point at, look for, etc., and it was a miracle she was ever able to get anything done at all. Ultimately in order to have ten minutes to herself she resorted to telling them to open the front door, close it behind them, pop down to the grocery store, pick up some evaporated milk--not the condensed, and the 5-ounce, not the 12-ounce--bag up some arugula, count out the exact change, drop a quarter in the Jerry's Kids box, see who was on the cover of People and report back. And if she was lucky, she was finished wiping by then. Cooper is a little more relaxed.

Our old dog Boomer, also a terrier mutt, was a good fit for us. She was so cute it wobbled your heart. She was so cute as a puppy that when she'd roll over and piddle on herself, that was cute, too. We snapped her up and stocked up on Lysol and called it a bargain. She was affectionate and loyal, but she also had an independent spirit that we appreciated, because we are not the sort of folk who want a dog's undivided attention. It was months before we were able to observe how she got out of the back yard, because it hadn't occurred to us that a fourteen-pound dog could climb a six-foot hedge, hand-over-hand. Then off she'd go on her daily route. Visits included the neighbor man, a set of pre-toppled garbage cans at the end of the alley, and the local tavern, where she'd enjoy a nice bowl of Heidelberg while the proprietor dialed us up for retrieval.

The neighbor man thought she was so cute that he routinely gave her as much food as she would take in. She could maintain that for the amount of time it took to get back home, where she would knock urgently at the front door, run inside and hurl on the floor, presenting us with the neighbor's dinner in virtually original condition. "That's bigger than her whole head," we would marvel in disbelief, and then she'd take two paces and do it again. Fortunately, she never ate the baking powder biscuits. Those were strictly for burying in the back yard. She didn't know how to climb back over the hedge, and so she would knock at the front door, run to the back door, shoot outside and stuff the biscuits in the garden somewhere. Boomer's Biscuit Mulch kept the weeds down for years.

For a dog this resourceful, dry kibble was definitely the food of last resort; she'd take one at a time and crunch it down, lips peeled back in distaste. We went through almost two bags of it in her entire lifetime. Who knows how much longer than seventeen years she would have lived with a proper diet?

I guess it's just as well we never had children, because we probably overvalue the ability of animals to fend for themselves. Consequently, in the post-Boomer years, we have become cat people. We are still the recipients of intense affection, expressed somewhat differently in the form of head-bonking, eyebrow-chewing, and kneecap-gnawing, but now we can go away for up to three days, leaving behind a critter with world-class napping skills and a rich interior life. When we come home, it will be to a very well-rested cat with three days of love stored up and a kneecap jones. Ain't nobody going to sleep tonight.

Dusting

I'm on about a three-month schedule for cleaning the toilet bowl, but Dave cleans it more like weekly, so it never needs it when I think to check. In general, I would say he is much tidier. Or I would say he's more obsessive-compulsive, depending on how crabby I am. Whichever, it has been pointed out that I'm not always holding up my end with the housecleaning. And since that is undoubtedly true, I have decided to do my part by leaning on the cat a little more. She's really slacking.

I will allow that Tater is practically a genius at getting most of the important stuff into the litter box, even without it having been explained to her, and that was pretty exciting for a while, because the previous cat was very unclear on the concept. Still, this doesn't get it to the curb. And she leaves little fuzzy clumps of DNA all over the place, just as though they couldn't easily be traced to her.

She does have a spot on the inside of her left thigh that she's kept sparkling. And she does periodically clean portions of our faces and kneecaps, although she tends to use her teeth to clean with, and no one really needs to be that clean. We point that out to her, loudly and suddenly, so perhaps we're guilty of sending mixed messages.

I have requested on numerous occasions that she start to pick up after herself a little, at least, but it's like talking to a teenager: you see the earnest, upturned face, but you can't tell if the earbuds are in. Tater gazes at us with a certain reverence, but the only thing registering in her cerebral cortex is: "eyebrows. Mmmmm. Chewy." And her reptilian brain is chanting: throw the mouse. Throw the mouse. Throw the mouse.

However, entirely on her own initiative and with dedication, she has taken to dusting off the computer keyboard with her belly fur. Results are mixed. The keyboard looks, if anything, worse, but she was able to clear quite a bit of data off the screen. Apropos of nothing, cats are really very hard to kill, and this one is all gristle and verve.

I think both of us had more or less resigned ourselves to a cat that was a net minus, in the cleaning department, until the evening we dozed off in our chairs in front of the TV. Gradually we became aware of a ten-pound black mammal creeping around the ceiling, which, if it hasn't happened to you, is startling in the extreme. The mammal dropped to the floor festooned in cobwebs and strolled out to dispose of them. As a cleanliness bonus, now we get to wash out our shorts, too.

Late-Breaking Mews

I may be the slowest scooper on the parade route, but I would really like to think that if there was a strange cat holed up inside my sofa, I'd be able to figure it out. I'd like to think that if my sofa were mewing, and if I had just purchased the sofa used, and if the mewing began on the day I brought the sofa home, I'd be able to connect some dots. If I were not able to put it all together, I doubt that my first reaction, upon sitting down on the sofa and feeling something move beneath me, would be to pick up the sofa and look. Not unless I could do it from up on the ceiling fan.

A Miss Vickie Mendenhall, of Spokane, however, had lived with a yowling davenport for quite a few days before her boyfriend discovered the cat by sitting on it. Perhaps they were distracted. Perhaps the TV was too loud. "It sounds like there's a zebra in the garage," Miss Mendenhall might say. "That Simon Cowell is a tool," the boyfriend would respond, and that would be all there was to that, until someone had to back out the Cherokee.

In reality, though, I might not have been any quicker on the uptake. A lot of times when I hear something, it's just safer all around to assume that no one else can hear it. Recently I began to notice that there was a mild little eep! sound every so often when I was sitting at the computer. Dave heard it too, although even we don't consider that a lock on reality. It seemed quite random and was so quiet, like a distant mouse at a surprise party, that we were never able to triangulate it. Out of nowhere would come another eep! and we'd both point to each other, unable to agree on a source. I eventually discovered that it came hourly, at nineteen minutes after. Then I heard it while I was in a whole other room. I suspected my watch itself, and quarantined it upstairs, to no avail. Eep! No matter where we were, at nineteen after the hour we heard a little eep! coming from somewhere nearby.

When it eeped shortly before people were coming for dinner, I got the brilliant idea of setting an alarm for 59 minutes and enlisting the whole crew to listen up. I forgot to tell them about it, though, and when the buzzer sounded, I suddenly jumped up and screamed at everybody. "Mikey! Stand by the basement door! Susan! Over here by the oven! Andrea! Next to the computer! Go, go, go! Be very quiet and listen!" They all ran to their places, one wondering if he should pick up a weapon, one wondering if she should summon a medical professional. And we found it. Everyone was pointing in the same direction, like it was the grassy knoll. The oven was eeping. We have no idea why.

It's just another little reminder of the passage of time, and puts me in mind a bit of those moments of existential dread you sometimes get in the middle of the night. Those were a lot scarier when I was younger; it would feel like a pellet of ice hitting my heart, when suddenly, out of nowhere, I would recognize my own death as an actual event in my own actual future. It was terrifying. Those moments have come up periodically throughout my life (eep!) but over the years I've paid less attention to them. Oh crap, I'm going to die, alert the press; boo hoo; now, don't forget to throw some compost on the strawberry patch. I'm not liable to do anything about the oven, either.

A Cat Show

My niece, Elizabeth, was the last person to take Dave to a cat show, and I understand she spent the whole time trying to put distance between them. Among other transgressions Elizabeth reported, Dave had been especially attentive when an exhibitor proudly showed off her Sphynx cats--a thin, hairless, wrinkly variety. "Mmm," he purred, leaning in. "They look delicious."

Later at a display for a feral cat sanctuary, Dave had expressed interest in helping with the annual round-up, at which the cats were herded to a location where their health issues could be addressed and adoptions could be negotiated. Dave enthusiastically touted his expertise with a rope and brand, but admitted he preferred to work on his own, because he didn't like to be around a lot of cat people. Elizabeth has nothing further to report beyond this, because she was too busy backing away. But Dave himself says the woman was entirely unfazed, and offered to invite him for a private herding and grooming session. She even followed up with a post card.

This says a lot about Dave, and also a lot about cat people. Cat people are so besotted with their charges that they are incapable of even registering an unkindness said about them. And Dave is never more easily entertained than when he can locate a loose string on a complete stranger and yank on it. (He used to get punched a lot.) At the cat show, it appears that Dave had free rein to yank strings all day long. Elizabeth emphatically declined to accompany him this year. So it was my turn to take Dave to the cat show. I'd never been to one.

Here's what a cat show is: upwards of three hundred people who own very special cats box them up, along with their litter pans, and set them on long tables. Then they sit in front of their boxed kitties and eat giant portions of greasy food. In order to look at the kitties you need to peer over someone's lap through a pall of nachos and French fries. The atmosphere is fun, friendly, and fairly fragrant.

There isn't a normal cat in the group. Some of them are flat-out bunnies. There are little leopards and tiny tigers, there are dust mops, there are the aforementioned hairless, wrinkly Sphynxes, and then there are my favorites, the Abyssinians: thin, tubular types that are clearly in the weasel family.

Periodically the cats are unboxed and submitted to poking and prodding by a judge. I'm not privy to what exactly goes on here, but one category seems to be feline elasticity, tested by stretching the cat out in mid-air (Abyssinians being hands-down the stretchiest); and there is the all-important bunghole exam, in which the judge lifts each cat's tail briefly and inspects underneath. He or she then marks down some notes. My suspicion is that the bunghole test is strictly pass/fail.

Following Elizabeth's advice, I made fairly quick rounds of the exhibits, not pausing quite long enough for Dave to engage with anybody, but he insisted on visiting his delicious friends, the Sphynxes. So we located that quadrant, and requested that one or two be hauled out for a photograph. The proud owners happily obliged, and just when Dave was beginning to make yummy noises, an exhibitor retrieved a sweater for her quivering cat and bundled it against the chill. It looked familiar somehow, that little bald wrinkled head poking out of a soft pink sheath, but Dave was no longer interested in eating it.

Fat Cats

People like to say they're dreaming of a white Christmas, but what they really mean is they would like a fluffy blanket of snow to appear overnight on Christmas eve after everyone has gotten to where they need to go--Grandmother's house or wherever--and hang around just long enough to exhaust the kids, then vanish in time for them to motor to the mall for the sales. Because we just had us the whitest Christmas ever here in Portland, and you've never heard a whinier bunch. I was able to maintain my joy and composure owing to my innate childlike nature and sense of wonder, coupled with my recent retirement and smug detachment from the requirements of the workaday world.

So to celebrate, I tromped out to the back yard on Christmas day to make me a snowman. It's never a snowMAN, of course. Usually some kind of critter. This time I thought I'd stick to the theme for once and opted to make a snow Santa Claus, complete with bowl full of jelly and slumpy hat (carved from snow: no accessorizing with fruit or fabric for me). I didn't have a single seasonal decoration inside my house, save greenery ground into the carpet from my boots. So Santa it was. I got my balls rolling, as it were, and built up a nice fat five-foot tower, which was all I could manage at my height. And I began to develop his face. I tried for cheeks like roses and a nose like a cherry, but when I stood back and looked, a bear was looking back at me. Well, bears were fat too, and I had a good start, so I switched gears. Once the ears were established, I stood back once more, and discovered that it was more of a cat after all. I didn't want to make a cat. But my own cat Tater had been holed out in the basement for two days in a state of horror over the dogs who were visiting, and her Christmas wasn't going well at all, so it seemed appropriate to do her some sort of honor. I began to build a five-foot cat.

This might not seem like the most deliberate way of going about one's art. Was Michelangelo aiming for another David when a crucial misstep with the chisel turned him into the Virgin Mary? My suspicion is that this sort of thing happens more often than you might think. Success is sometimes just a matter of remaining flexible, poised to snatch opportunity from the maw of failure. This is why so many of my culinary efforts gone awry get renamed (Chicken Surprise, Beans Vesuvius). This is even how something as nifty as a war can be got up. You might start out by proposing a war to avenge an unrelated terror attack, and when that doesn't fly, you conjure up a dictator, then evildoers in general, and when people still balk, you remind them about threats to your daddy, and if that doesn't get any traction, you suggest that poor old defenseless Christianity itself is under fire by dark, unattractively hairy men, and only when all else fails, you bring up the possibility of imminent nuclear annihilation, and by God it's bombs-away. No different, fundamentally, from making a cat out of a Santa Claus.

So the cat was looking pretty good, overall, and I began to chunk the legs on, but by the time I had the tail attached and curled around to the front, it didn't look quite right. Rather paunchy, in fact. I had momentarily forgotten the shape of a natural sitting kitty, and instead had created a fat tub of goo with its front legs bowed out and no proper hunchiness towards the back at all. Which is what I should have anticipated by starting out with a Santa Claus armature. But there wasn't going to be enough time to make it right before dinner was served, and it didn't look all that bad seen from the front. Maybe people won't look too carefully. Maybe I can just hang a "Kitty Accomplished" sign over it, and hope people don't notice that there's not enough snow backing it up, not nearly enough.