A Cat's Tale

A Cat’s Tale ©

By Michael Casey

As you all know we have a cat, or as on DT reader said, the cat has you. You do not own a cat, you are just part of its world. The cat allows you to feed it and look after it, the cat, or Totoro as our kitten is called is just playing with us. Totoro knows he has nine lives, and 4 people queuing up to stroke him, though we discovered he was in fact a she. That was Totoro’s first deception, if he was a male maybe we wouldn’t have as much work to do.

Totoro just loves running and I mean running around the house and bouncing from one new settee to another, in between diving at the scratch post we bought. Then he’ll or rather she’ll wait next to a door so she can bounce around the next room. She likes diving from the old sofa to the piano, and then to the bookcase and a with a flip over the old covered orange chair to the front room window windowsill. I’m sure she’s on drugs. Whenever I take out my bag of medicine she always wants to dive inside. Perhaps in another life she was a drugs dealer, she just loves trying to get into my bacg of heart medicine.

So as she has had her two inoculations I decided to let her have more supervised play time in the garden, I don’t believe in cats being house cats, cats like walking on fences and howling at the moon. So Totoro was good and came back when I shook the bag of cat treats, £1 from Poundland, in fact Totoro would sell her soul for a cat treat. This worked fine for a day or so. Then maybe it was the hot weather the cat disappeared, I’d been having an afternoon rest, much needed  after cardiac surgery, so I had to investigate the case of the missing kitty.

We looked high and low, you have to as kittens can climb, eventually my small daughter found her asleep in the store where we keep the grass cutters. It was a warm and secure place, so obviously that was where Totoro chose to sleep. Later on Totoro  decided to have another adventure, she disappeared up the alley and over fences, to have tea with the other cats. Tea could be a metaphor for many things. Four fools went ashearching, the kitten just laughed, we must have spent a couple of hours in the pursuit. The neighbourhood cats just laughed looking on from roof tops and from back bed room windows, where they were watching budding computer geniuses when they weren’t looking out the window.

As twilight fell Totoro allowed herself to be caught, kittens control owners, it is never the other way around. So relieved Totoro was borne home and lauded and fed. So Totoro went to bed happy with a smile on her face, maybe plotting her next big adventure. Today the sun had its hat on, the hottest day of the year, so Totoro had her next plan ready. I’d been up at the secondary school to do some admin for my small daughter’s transfer, the sun had its hat on, but Totoro had her coat on.

I let her out for supervised play then she disappeared, first up a tree like a tree surgeon or even a mountain climber, how can kittens climb so fearlessly, I pretended to be a dog in an effort to get her to come back, but this did not work. I shaked the cat treats, but she was not interested, so this kitten had no soul to sell. My brother would have sold his soul for a Rolo as a child but Totoro was soulless.

I went on the school run and came home with a concerned child, so she prayed to Saint Martin de Porres  again, asking him to bring back Totoro home. It had worked yesterday twice, so would this be third time lucky. I told her cats like traveling, they have several owners, and even several aliased, and get fed by all. Not to worry, and if Totoro loved us then she would return.

I then went for my post cardiac rest, you cannot worry too much about a cat when you have to listen to your body. Nearly six months post op and still a lot of pain and new pain from my old arthritis, besides we had cats for 30 years at home, I know cats can look after themselves.

When I arose, like Dracula, they gave me Iron tablets last week, anyway the cat had come running after her name had been called. All’s well that ends well, as some fellow writer from down the road from my house once said. You just have to trust a cat’s nature, she isn’t worried about you, she’s just plotting to do just exactly what she wants to do. A cat owns you and you just have to accept it, she’ll please herself, she has her own life to lead, nine in fact, and you are just lucky if she shares one of them with you.