As I am writing this it is hard to think of anything other than the
Roman Circus, which is going on in Washington. The damage or ultimate good it will cause this country is impossible to calculate now. Perhaps Molly Ivins, a columnist from Dallas, had the last word. "My fellow Americans, we live in a great nation. Its occasional resemblance to a lunatic asylum is purely coincidental and not the fault of the Author of Us. All."
On to things I can handle without anger! Modern living involves adjusting to a lot of things, some good, and some bad. But one thing I have never gotten used to in spite of many years of experience is the peculiarly distinctive sound that a Siamese cat makes. It is somewhere between a fingernail grinding down a blackboard and a foghorn. For many years, the feline who manages my household, maintained a discreet silence most of the time. Very early in her life her primal urges were eliminated and she settled into a civilized relationship with the few humans she tolerates. But the surgery did not, unfortunately, affect her vocal chords.
When I retired from a full time job, the cat sound level immediately escalated. While I was working, she had dry food available at all times, and got a treat of canned food whenever I got home. Now that I am home most of the time, I can set the clock by her. Promptly at 12:00 she starts to howl, and keeps it up intermittently until I give in. My vet suggested that since reasoning with a cat is quite impossible, I compromise and give her half of her treat early and hold out as long as possible with the rest. It helps a little, but so far she is winning the contest, naturally.
Cats are peculiar creatures. Their curiosity is unquenchable and makes a baby seem apathetic. I have a friend who has two Himalayan kittens. She tells me that she recently papered part of her house and used the bathtub to mix the paste. One after the other, both kittens had to investigate, and fell in. De-pasting kittens added more stress to the job than she had planned. Cats related to the Siamese, as Himalayans are, carry their tails straight upright anyway, but those little creatures had no choice. They couldn't bend them. They were pasted up.
I have a friend who moves from house to house fairly often. She has two cats who love stairs. So she always feels compelled to choose a house with at least one flight of stairs, carpeted, of course. But the cats' very favorite house of all had three lovely flights, and the speed record was threatened daily as they raced from bottom to top to bottom over and over again.
My son once had a cat named Hyacinth. He hauled the kitten in a paper sack all the way from upper Manhattan to his apartment in Greenwich Village on the subway, a ride of at least a half hour. I was never given the details of the trip, but I gather that there was some excitement. Hyacinth developed an odd feeding habit. Dry cat food comes in little pellets in the shape of an x. Hyacinth would eat only the arms of the xs and would never touch the little round core, which was left. If it wasn't an x she wouldn't eat it. No matter how hungry, she would not touch what might in human terms be called the doughnut holes.
I have one friend who met a strange cat under unusual circumstances. As the story was related by his wife, he was sleeping peacefully one night when he sensed that he was being stared at. He opened one eye to find himself eyeball to eyeball with a large cat he had never seen before. I believe they nailed their cat door shut after that. He was lucky it was a cat. I had another friend who met a skunk that way, but that's another story.
There are a lot of unanswered questions about cats. Why do they so resent seeing you lying peacefully on the couch reading a book that they must lie down just under your chin completely cutting off your view of the page? Why do they become indignant when you sit on your own furniture if it happens to be on their favorite spot? They run the place, that's why. Erma Bombeck, not a cat lover, has this to say, "If cats were human they'd watch "Masterpiece Theater, drive a German import car, belong to a country club, melt brie before serving, subscribe to the New York Times Book Review every Sunday and think Harley-Davidson was a law firm."