Such a cute kitty,
and then . . . meooooowww!!

Robyn’s Hood
By Robyn McCloskey

There is a verse in the Bible that says, "Blessed is he whose quiver is full," which I take to mean, "If you have a bunch of kids, then you are blessed." This must be true, because I know that whenever I see anyone with a lot of kids, I think "God bless you."
We have good friends who happen to have five children, and the husband is famous for saying, "I don’t know if my quiver is full, but my minivan sure is."
Well, with only three kids in our family, my minivan may not be full but my husband would argue that our litter box certainly is. Thirteen years ago I decided we needed a family pet, and since I am too lazy to take care of a dog, and quite frankly am leery of the constant devotion, I convinced my husband that cats were the way to go.
I like their spirit of independence, their aloofness, their attitude of "I could care less if you are here or not." I think cats keep you humble, whereas dogs tend to feed the ego. My husband reluctantly caved to my request, but not before declaring, "Don’t expect me to do anything for them except bury them when they die."
Little did he know what he was in for. So now I am stuck with two curmudgeonly old cats that show absolutely no interest in my existence. But it was just a few short months ago that our youngest daughter found a kitten in the woods and desperately wanted to rescue it. So I, in a rare act of brilliance, managed to present said kitten to my husband on our 19th wedding anniversary.
How could he refuse, especially with our beautiful 6-year-old staring up at him with her big blue pleading eyes and me staring up at him with a look that said, "Look pal, I’ve put in nineteen years, you owe me."
And that is how we added to our litter. We welcomed our brand-new polydactyl cat — that’s a really fancy word meaning a cat that has more than five toes on one paw, or, more loosely translated, a cat that was subject to inbreeding and is now deformed and also may not be the sharpest tool in the shed.
And so it was that I, in a more common act of absentmindedness, was backing out of the driveway and accidentally killed the poor thing. Since there were no tire tracks on the body and no dents on the van, I am choosing to believe that I did not run over it, but that it just happened to have an embolism at the precise moment I was backing out of the driveway.
Either way, my husband summed it up best. "At least he had a good month."
My husband always knows what to say in these situations. But I prefer to recall this tragic episode with the last line of the Brad Pitt movie Legends of the Fall.
"It was a good death."
Upon hearing the sad news, my sister-in-law and her fiancé, who happen to be diehard cat lovers (no pun intended), felt so bad about the murder . . . I mean incident . . . that they promptly appeared at our door with an abandoned kitten they had just rescued from a barn.
Apparently our family has some sort of "savior complex" when it comes to cats. Again my poor husband was in no position to argue. So now we are back to being a three-cat family, although I think our new neighbors may have a suspicion that we are running an illegal cat shelter.
When we moved last month (same neighborhood, different house), the two older cats, which I believe are suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s, kept returning to our old house. So every day I had to drive to the old house with cat-carrier in tow, pick up one of the cats, take it to the new house, drive back to the old house, pick up the other cat and bring it to the new house.
This process went on for two weeks straight, so by our new neighbor’s calculations we should have about 28 cats. I keep waiting for a knock on the door from the humane society. I can only hope that when they show up, my husband is not the one to answer, for he would heartily say, "Why yes, officer, you are correct, we have way too many cats. Feel free to confiscate any and all that you find."
Which not only would mean no cats in the house to deal with, but also no cats to bury. Unless, of course, they make the mistake of being in the driveway while I’m backing out. ••
Robyn McCloskey’s column appears each week in the Northeast Times. She can be reached at crmccloskey@verizon.net