Transcript
Hi, I'm Dan Slone.
Welcome to Dan’s Tiki Bar and this episode of Bits & Peaces.
Today, I'm going to tell a story about a cat.
This was actually my first cat. I grew up in a house without cats. My mother really really really didn't like cats. In fact, one of my earliest childhood memories is we were at one of these burger and fried chicken places where they bring the food out to the car and they put the tray on the door. My parents ate there fairly often, and I’d get bored in the car, and they'd let me sort of run around in the immediate area the car. And I can remember seeing a cat come through a fence and running over to it to pet it, my mother yelling from the car “Get away from that cat! They're dirty!” And so I grew up thinking there was something wrong with cats.
My mom died when I was about 15 and my dad traveled a lot. And one time when he went away, I rescued a whole litter of kittens and brought them back to the house, and I put them in the bathtub. And my dad called from on travel, and yeah, I knew he shouldn't know that I had these cats, but in the background he could hear them going meow meow meow meow and carrying on in the bathtub. So, he said, “What's that?” and I told him I'd rescued these cats. He said, “That's fine as long as they're all gone by the time I get home” and they mostly were. I found homes for all of them, rushed about getting them homes, but there was one of them that really caught my interest. In part, because of the way he interacted with my dog.
I had a dog. He was sort of this mutant Yorkshire Terrier. He was bigger than a normal Yorkshire Terrier. My little sister had named him Whiskers, and he was a very very friendly very very sweet dog. But the kittens, whenever they'd come around the dog, they would arch their back and jump around and hiss at him except for this one. So, I found homes for all the rest and I kept that one and my dad said it was okay. And I kept that one and I named him Stupid. I didn't name Stupid because he lacked intelligence. He was actually pretty smart cat. I named him Stupid because I was 15 and because I wanted to be able to go to the door of our house and stand there and shout into the yard, “Hey Stupid get in here,” which I did fairly often. Stupid was a great cat.
He grew up playing with the Yorkshire Terrier, Whiskers, and he delighted in terrorizing this poor dog. And if anyone ever tries to tell you that animals don't have a sense of humor, you'll just have to tell them they plainly don't know animals. This cat would come running into the room and quickly hide next to the door. So he's next to the wall beside the door, and the Yorkie would come in, who's a happy-go-lucky dog, and he come in with his head wagging back and forth, and the cat would leap on top of him and they’d go rolling across the floor. When they finally came up, the cat would have maneuvered so that he had his claws in the dog’s whiskers, which would of course cause the dog to panic and start backing up suddenly. And as he backed up, the cat would just hang on with his claws and he would just go riding across the hardwood floor and looking around like he was sightseeing and this was the most fun thing in the in the world.
He was a pretty smart cat. He started getting into mischief pretty much as soon as he started going out. My father wouldn't put up with litter boxes in the house. So the cat was mostly an outside cat that came in every once in a while. And one day I got this call, and I picked up the phone and there's this woman yelling at me with this German accent and it takes me a moment to understand that she is my neighbor. And the reason it takes a moment is because one of the few other times I'd ever spoken with that neighbor, she was also yelling at me. This was because me and some of my friends, we’d just gotten in the band and we’d just gotten our instruments. They were all pretty much brass instruments - trumpets and trombones and such. And we were in our backyard playing these instruments and of course playing with all the gusto of people who have brand new noisemakers, but have no skills yet in music. So she happened to be pregnant at the time, and I can remember her standing in the yard yelling at us. Well, she's yelling at me again on the phone and it takes me a minute to figure out what has gone wrong. And what has gone wrong is she has left her glass sliding door open, and she has returned home to find my cat on her counter eating the middle of a loaf of bread. He's eating through the plastic and he's eating the loaf of bread, and she's telling me my cat shouldn't do that anymore. It was only a few weeks later when she called again, and again yelling, and I really did think about it, and I'm not sure that I ever heard her speak other than yelling at me. But this time, she had left her sliding glass door open again. You'd think maybe the lesson here would be not to leave your sliding glass door open, but she left it open again. And this time she'd come in and the German chocolate cake that she had just fixed and placed in the middle of her table, my cat was eating. I don't know why this cat liked going in her house. It's kind of weird. I’d never heard of him going into anyone else's house.
Fortunately, we moved soon after that. My father married a nice Southern Baptist woman and we moved to her house. And they set me up in a trailer outside, Whiskers and me, sort of bachelor quarters outside. Stupid was there as well, though mostly he lived in a little house that I built him right next to the trailer. And, of course, being the sensitive sort of person I was at 15, I painted across the front of it, so that it would be observed by all of my new stepmother’s friends as they drove into the driveway. I painted Cathouse on it, which I thought was startlingly funny.
This cat had more than a sense of humor. He had a sense of vengeance as well. I had a 1965 Mustang. It was a convertible, white on the outside, red interior, 8-cylinder. It was a gorgeous car. In the back of it was a jumble of busboy jackets and trombones and you know all of the accoutrements of a juvenile delinquent. And if I was late in feeding this cat, he would jump in the back of that car and pee. And unfortunately, I typically wouldn't find out about this until I was on my way to school and had to marinate in this smell on the way in, and would typically smell that way for the rest of the day. Certainly not the way any teenage guy wants to go through a school day, and even worse if I was on my way to work and I had to put on one of those jackets. So I tried really hard not to be late in feeding this cat.
Unfortunately, I didn't know much about cats or how to take care of them at the time, and so I let him grow up as an unneutered male. And of course he became a tomcat, and he would leave for days and come back exhausted and lay around for a couple of days recuperating, and then he would leave for days. And sometimes when he was gone too long, I'd walk around the neighborhood and look for him. and check and make sure he was okay. And, of course, one day I found him. He’d been hit by a car and he was gone and that really changed the way I thought about cats. After that, we never had another cat that was an outside cat, unless we got it as an outside cat. And I'll tell you how that happened with great regularity when we went to the farm. But I've just felt strongly that I never wanted to go through that sort of experience again, but the general experience of raising Stupid was that I found that he was not a demon in fur. And I determined that I kind of liked cats and that begin a long relationship with cats as well.
I hope you enjoyed this episode! Please join us again next time on Bits & Peaces.
We talk more about the animals that have joined Martha and me in our life. You have a great week.
Take care. Bye!
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