I was home for a few days this past weekend, catching up with some old high school friends in town from San Francisco. Since my family home is in Birmingham, and I live in Atlanta, it was easier to bring my cat with me than to board her. Mom loves cats, the nuttier the better, so she made few demands other than “Leave her here when you go out with your friends.” My mother’s relationships with cats can best be shown with a couple of examples. When my little sister found out that she was pregnant, swearing Mother to secrecy, Mom kept from bursting with excitement by telling the cat. And he wasn’t the kind of cat who really gave a shit about other people’s good news. He spit whenever he heard my older brother’s name, for reasons known only to himself. His vet file said “BITES” in huge letters on the side. He just wasn’t the kind of cat to be happy about a baby, more the kind that would feed the old superstitions about cats sitting on babies and stealing the breath straight from their little mouths until they suffocate.
Then there was the time that I was living at home while going through a divorce and applying to law school. I’d been with the same guy since I was 18, and Mom was kind of freaked about me, and I was pretty damn stressed myself, so her way of helping me was to bring the cat around me and tell him nice things about me, especially things that the cat and I had in common. Basically that we’re quiet and look good, but she made that go a long way.
So I wasn’t worried about leaving Mom with the cat or vice versa. My cat is actually nice, so I felt pretty good about it, as a matter of fact. And the next morning, I found that Mom and the cat had spent a wonderful evening watching an I Love Lucy marathon together. This seemed like the perfect combination of factors for more reasons than I can articulate. First of all, there’s the way my mom feels about cats. On top of that, there’s the way she feels about I Love Lucy. Suffice to say that I think her epitaph should say “She was zany.” But more importantly is the way that Mom is about TV. She’s like a one-woman Greek chorus for the slowest witted TV companion you could ever find. Basically, a TV watcher would have to be very hard of hearing or nearly blind or unable to speak much English for Mom’s helpful asides to be anything but massive plot-spoilers or punch-line jumpers. For instance, if someone is wearing a wig that is going to fall off at a humorous moment, she’ll turn around four seconds before it happens and stage whisper, “Don’t forget she’s wearing a W-I-G.” Thanks, Mom, you saved the joke for me. I never would have noticed the humor in seeing someone’s wig fall off during a tango contest if you hadn’t told me to expect it. A cat, on the other hand, might actually miss this sort of humor if he doesn’t know to pay attention. And if it’s a particularly sharp cat who’s already familiar with physical comedy, then at least he probably can’t spell, so her comment will go right over his head.
The only thing that keeps Mom from being an ideal cat owner– well, there are a few. She’s allergic. Okay, she could maybe deal with that. Except that she also has lots of antiques that she really doesn’t like broken or pissed on, and her cats tend to be psychotic, so they piss everywhere and break things. And, of course, she likes to watch them sleep and then kiss them on the nose– right, wake the cat up with a large predator’s mouth right in his face. Two stitches to the eye, and she took it really personally. Then there’s the fact that she really beleves that cats speak English and are intelligent. Sorry, Mom, sorry all cat lovers, but while they may speak English, they have the intelligence of about an eighteen month old human. If my siblings and I had still had the intelligence of eighteen month old humans when we were eighteen months old, we’d be dead. Mom has no patience for the slow, in spite of the fact that she caters her TV commentary to them.
I guess that’s Mom’s deal with cats in a nutshell: she treats them like they’re her children. Speaking from my own experience, that means that she feeds them milk that’s “just a little blinky,” but also gives them fresh whipped cream and homemade soups, dances with them (probably to Amy Winehouse), dotes on them madly, scares them silly by telling them about the nice ghost she knew when she was a kid (and the poltergeist who threw her grandmother across a room by her braids), and generally overstimulates the poor creatures with everything but structure and supervision. If anyone knows of a pet who responds well to this kind of treatment, please, please, please tell me.
