Transcript
Hi, I'm Dan Slone. This is Dan's Tiki Bar. Welcome to another episode of Bits & Peaces.
Last time, I was telling you about my first cat, Stupid. It was several years before I got another. Martha and I had just gotten married, and we'd moved to Alexandria, Virginia for the summer. She was going to be working as a physical therapist, and I was going to be working as an investigator for the Washington DC Public Defender Service. We've moved in with our friend, George, in his apartment in Alexandria. I began that summer very sick. First in the hospital and then at the apartment, and to cheer me up, Martha went out and got a kitten - this little tortoiseshell kitten and brought it home.
Now, I don't remember us asking George's permission to bring this cat in, at least not in a way that he could readily say no. This cat was incredibly affectionate, at least to Martha and me. Now George, he played a little rough with her and teased her some. And we didn't really know anything about tortitude, which is something we learned about later, which is this attitude that all Tortoiseshell cats have. They don't take anything off of anybody. One night, as we were all heading to bed, we hear this bellow from the room next door. George yelling “Your cat just crapped in my bed!” and you know, we all sort of thought it was an accident. Maybe the litter box wasn't clean enough or whatever. It was modestly funny to us, but it happened again about a week later. And then it happened any time that George didn't close his door to his bedroom. It was the only place she did it. Only place was in George's room. If he left that door open for even a moment, she was in and had her revenge.
Now, I'm sure George was pretty pleased at the end of the summer when Martha and I moved back to college. And as happens at college, we had a few friends over a few times and our very affectionate cat would jump in a friend's lap. And so one evening, she jumps in our friend David's lap, and he started petting her and she growled. And he then tried to move her off his lap, and she hissed and swiped at him. David looked at us going “What should I do?” and we said just be still, be very still. At another party, our friend Don had the same circumstance. She gets in his lap. He tries to move her. She hisses some. We say “Don, why don't you let us get her out of your lap. And Don says, “No, no no. I'm great with cats.” The next day Don, having recovered from the fairly substantial daiquiris we were serving. The next day Don calls and says “Why do I have deep scratches all down my arms?”
This cat had some territorial thing. We couldn't get the same cat sitter twice. When we’d travel, we'd have to get a cat sitter and she, not the cat sitter but the cat, would wait at the top of the steps, and when the cat sitter would come up the stairs, Tolken would reach out and try to swipe her face. Sometimes she'd draw blood and sometimes she'd miss, but no one wanted to come back and be a cat sitter for us again.
One time my friend, Frank, was helping us move, and he was there at the house by himself and he had an arm full of clothes carrying clothes down from upstairs, and Tolken jumped on his leg. And wrapped her claws around, sunk the claws into the back of the leg and was biting him on the leg as he's going down the steps carrying this, you know, huge arm load of clothes, and he's shaking his leg trying to shake this cat off of his leg. She was very protective.
One of her incredible talents was important to us when we first came back to college because we'd moved into married students’ apartments. We were newlyweds, still in college, and we lived in these pretty rundown apartments. This sewage would back up through the sinks every once in a while, and there were battalions of cockroaches running around places. And Tolken had this special cry that she gave when she was hunting cockroaches. It was this sort of extended meow and you knew she was hunting cockroaches. One day, she was looking up at this needlepoint that my mother-in-law had given us, a sort of still fruit needlepoint and it had a watermelon on it with seeds, and she was giving this cry. Martha held her up and said “You silly cat. Those aren't bugs. Those are just the watermelon seeds. This is just a needlepoint” and she held her close to the needlepoint and this enormous cockroach ran out from behind the frame. We learned to trust Tolken’s bug cry.
One evening, she gave the bug cry and she was sort of pawing at our bed. It was just before we were going to bed. She’s pawing at the bed and we throw back the covers, and there's this Kafka size roach in our bed, so she was pretty valuable there at the married students’ apartments.
She lived a good long life and, during her life, what I think hooked me on cats was this personality. This loving but protective, defensive, sometimes evil personality. She was never standoffish with us. We’d never actually experienced that in a cat that we kept inside. She was more like a smart dog, and she definitely was a surrogate child for us in the many years we practiced figuring out how to raise some other creature besides ourselves.
Thank you for joining me for this episode of Bits & Peaces.
I hope you'll come back next time.
You take care. Have a great week. Bye!