Adventures of a Cowardly Brown Cat

Considering that our Tonkinese cat Moby sleeps about 22 hours a day, he still manages to get himself into an awful lot of trouble (during those remaining 2 hours of the day). This is a cat who hides under the blankets or in a closet when strange people come to the house. All it takes for both cats to scatter into the nooks and crannies of the house is a ring of the doorbell. The difference between Moby and his sister Cookie, is that Cookie is ruled by her stomach. She'll come out to inform us that it's meal time regardless of who's in the house when she gets hungry enough (which seems to be every few minutes). Then there's no ignoring her until she gets her bowl of chicken and liver Fancy Feast.

Moby, on the other hand, does not come out to request food or a lap if he hears people who don't live in the house. As my father likes to say, “Moby only sees people by appointment.” So Moby tends to get into little fixes when he's alone and bored- and there's no one to save him from himself.

A few days ago we got a knock on the door from the guy who lives downstairs.

“Do you have a brown cat at home?”

“... Er, yes.”

“Are you sure he's actually at home?”

My parents just looked at each other, and then back at the neighbor.

“Why?”

“Because there's a big brown cat on my balcony.”

My mother looked out the window and found Moby staring at her from the balcony below us. We don't know how he got there, whether he jumped or fell but my feeling is that he was discombobulated by the presence of the sukkah on our balcony. “I don't understand what this strange hut is doing out here! I will jump up on the wall to investigaaaaaaaaaah!”

So my mother had to go down and rescue the big dumb ball of fluff. She picked him up and carried him out of the neighbors' apartment but he freaked out in the hallway and ran downstairs to the lower level and then back up when he realized his mistake.

He was obviously somewhat traumatized by the whole incident. The next morning, we couldn't find him. He had last been seen sitting on the edge of the bed at 6:00 am and by 11:00 we had all 3 of us torn the house apart looking for him and had gone over to all the neighbors to ask if they had by any chance noticed a big brown cat on their balcony or in their house. Who knows, maybe Moby had gotten a taste for adventure? Maybe he had fallen off the wall again? A few years ago our next door neighbor had found him roaming around their apartment, sniffing at the laundry. But alas, no one had seen or heard a cat. My mother was panicking, thinking he had wandered off to die. I pointed out to her that even if he had, his body would still not have disappeared into thin air. That's against the laws of physics and biology.

I had even started making up flyers to hang in the building with his picture and our apartment and phone numbers when my father found him. He'd heard rustling in a box on a shelf and found Moby napping inside it. After all that, he'd been hiding in a box for 5 hours.

We called my mother to inform her that the big lug had been located so she'd stop worrying. She was still worried though that he was behaving strangely. Maybe she hasn't yet figured out that Moby is just a weird cat to begin with. This is the cat we found hanging by his front claws from a coat on the coat rack, and the cat that got one of his claws stuck in his own mouth (we had to call the vet in for that one). We once watched him get his paw stuck to the underside of the living room chair while trying to extract his toy mouse from underneath it. While trying to free himself, he got his second front paw stuck to the chair. By the time we were able to pick ourselves up off the floor and stop laughing at him, he had gotten all 4 paws stuck to the chair. His mouse was still underneath it and was probably laughing at him too.

One day, Cookie was howling at us and running around the house looking distraught. She finally ran up to the front door and sat there yowling until we opened it and found Moby sitting on the door mat waiting to come in.

Owning cats is a trip. Any cat owner will tell you that there's no such thing as a normal cat. All cats are weird. It's part of their nature. Why does Moby like to sleep on my dad's underwear? We'll probably never know. My dad claims that it's to prevent underwear thieves from running off with all his clean underwear. Why does Moby prefer to play with necklaces rather than string? Maybe it's best not to conjecture on that particular issue. Why does Cookie treat the humans like furniture? Because she can. Why did she walk into my room early in the morning, cough until I woke up, and then leave? Because she's a jerk. Why does Cookie aim when she pukes to get the maximum amount of splatter? Maybe it amuses her. Maybe she thinks she's somehow doing us a favor in her warped, pea-sized, kitty brain. She likes to stand on the stairs and see how many steps she can puke on at once, while getting the vomit in between the rungs to hit the coat rack and as much area as possible underneath the stairs as well. Maybe this is the cat version of ring toss- 'Puke Toss'.

So why does my mother worry when the cats are acting weird? I don't know. Living with cats is always an adventure. The real question we cat lovers have to ask ourselves is, even though they abuse us, try to steal our dinner, poop on our history notebooks (thank you Mimi), treat us like furniture and food machines, and make general nuisances of themselves- why do we still love 'em?

Well, for reasons such as these:

That is all.