Tag Archives: cats

What the Cat Left (or, De-Peeing the Shoe)

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The ghost of a Teva, doused in baking soda: Is there an afterlife beyond death by urination?

It wasn’t Husbot’s fault. How was he to know, when he left his new shoes on the bathroom floor before he left town for two days, that they would become the definitive piece of the perfect storm? Alone, they were just a pair of Tevas. But their presence converged with several key events to create a panic in the laundry room last Thursday. The other events were, like the shoes, unimpressive individually: a litter box that needed cleaning. A lack of kitty litter on the premises (we’d recently run out). And Tesserwell, the cat, is old and a bit crotchety.

He has been known, when the management slacks off in their janitorial duties, to relieve himself upon whatever happens to be on the bathroom floor: a bath mat. A towel. Husbot’s new Tevas.

I have always been able to clean the towels by washing them immediately (sometimes twice) with regular detergent and baking soda. But shoes?

I discovered them smelling like less-than-new the morning Husbot was due to arrive home. So last Thursday found me pulling out all my cleaning guns in an attempt to de-pee the shoes.

First I just washed them with Dreft. But even before lifting the washing machine lid all the way afterward, I smelled the unmistakable odor of kitty cologne. I dumped baking soda on them and let them sit for several hours before washing. Eau de Kitty still as strong as before. Then I washed them with baking soda and All. No change in the Pee Pee Parfum.

At that point, I consulted Google. ”Soak it up with kitty litter,” I was advised. Well if I had kitty litter, I thought, I wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. And besides, if baking soda didn’t work, I couldn’t imagine kitty litter would do any better. And time was running out: Husbot would be home after dinner.

I decided against Clorox because it kills Spandex. I reached for the intensely foul-smelling but sometimes effective Resolve. I turned on the vent, doused both shoes heavily, started the washer again, and fled. If there was a detergent called “Hope,” my bottle would have been empty.

An hour before he was due home, I pulled the poor Tevas out of the machine and they smelled….

Friend to cat lovers and the spouses of cat lovers. (drugstore.com)

…as good as new.

I set them on the bathroom floor, just where Husbot had left them.

I emptied the litterbox.

I bought a new bottle of Resolve.

And everyone lived happily ever after.

I’d Rather Be Eating Something Cold and Fattening

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"Tesserwell Surfing the Perfect Wave," by Mbot. 17" x 14" acrylic on newsprint. Contact agent for price.

I apologize for the four-day break. It’s partly due to the new heat of summer. Although not scheduled in the rest of the world to begin until June twenty-first, summer officially started in Arizona at the dawn of the Cenozoic era. The heat is squashing me flat.

Thankfully, it doesn’t seem to be affecting the bots, the dog, or the antique cat (above), who apparently is projecting such a spunky aura that he was recently depicted by a local artist as a surfer dude. (Mbot named the painting himself; several days earlier, he pointed out, while reading The Stomach Book for the five hundredth time, that the villi were surfing the perfect spit-up. (In fact, I believe they were riding on a river of diarrhea. Tomato, tomahto.)

But I am not surfing the perfect anything. The mercury has risen to just beneath my nose. I’ll get used to it. We’ll get into our summer routine: out early, wading pool, sprinkler, swimming. But really. Deserts are for adding an “s” to and eating.

Desert or dessert? I'll have one of the latter, please.

A Handful of Salt, The End

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I am (finally) weaning Gbot completely off the bottle. No more comforting suckling, even of water, through a synthetic nipple in the evening and again come morning. It is not a process conducive to sleep for either of us. I don’t think I’ve been this tired since he was an infant, back in the days when sixteen month-old Mbot raged against sleep. I remember lying in the recovery room after the C-section, numb from the ribcage down, Gbot swaddled on my chest. The intensity of the relief I felt was overwhelming, and it was caused not only by the fact that I had a new and beautiful, healthy child, and that I was healthy too (as I hadn’t been with Mbot), but by the knowledge that as long as my legs were numb, I couldn’t get up and do anything.

So instead of doing any more today, I’m going to post the last part of A Handful of Salt.

Old Woman Feeding a Cat, by Gabriel Metsu, 1629-1667 (www.codart.nl)

His body was trembling, but it was from the cold. I drew my open hands down his broad, thinly shirted back. Heard the hollow metal clink as my keys fell from numb fingers onto the ice at our feet. “It’s freezing,” I replied. “You need to go upstairs.”

“By myself?”

“Yes,” I said.

Dave bent to pick up the keys. They lay shining beside the toe of my pump. He could have put them in his pocket, but it wouldn’t have mattered. He handed them to me.

I drove home carefully, because four-inch heels and gas pedals are another one of those untenable pairings. Why do I drive more cautiously than I love? The statistics of loss in both, due to alcohol or carelessness, are uninspiring.

 *   *   *

The Gordon setters slept. Michael wound down his monologue. The ice in my water was melting, leaving opalescent globes of sweat on the glass’s exterior. The glass was still half full. “I’ll think about it,” I said. What’s the next step?”

“Email me a writing sample,” he replied. “But not the first chapter of a novel.” He had no interest in other people’s dreams. “And no more than five hundred words.”

But wouldn’t that be like you only showing me only half of one of your pictures? I did not ask. I mean, if a picture’s worth a thousand words? Instead, I shook his hand. The dogs raised their heads before dropping them again between chestnut paws, and I stepped out into the cold.

In the eighth grade, I learned quickly that my application of the periodic table failed on several fronts. It was highly useful, but only if I didn’t ask too much of it. Yet it held some disturbing truths. Early on, I identified the perfect element I wanted to be: carbon. It is highly stable, and is capable of forming multiple stable covalent bonds—that is, it doesn’t give or take energy, but shares equitably. Then I discovered that it is alone in its perfection. And so it can form no perfect bond other than with itself. In the place on the periodic table where the perfect elements should exist, right down the middle, an interesting phenomenon occurs: Just when you think you’re going to sneak up on the admirable, well-balanced atom with half its outer shell filled, a rogue energy level appears, holding a single electron. Imagine that: all that empty space, needing to be filled. All that wanting. And so nature made even an atom of iron an object that desires.

I drove home through snow falling as though dumped from Dylan Thomas’s whitewash buckets down the sky. I peered out into the darkness as frozen stars bombarded the glass, as though I was going at warp speed through deep space—away from Michael, away from Dave. I would not write five hundred words. Three years later I would see a copy of the book, glossy and weighty in my hands. I paged through it, admiring the photographs, each one more breathtaking than the last. But what I was really looking for was words. Had he found a bird and poured his handful of salt onto her tail to catch her, as the old wive’s tale recommends? It was with a deep satisfaction that I saw he had not. There wasn’t any text at all.

I parked my Subaru in front of my cabin and shuffled through the silent snow on the porch and opened the door. My cat, backlit on the kitchen counter, cried softly in greeting and landed on the linoleum floor with a thump.

I have a theory about why old women with cats have been made the brunt of jokes through the ages: old women with cats in their valence shells don’t need men. And that makes them powerful. But the silence beyond the purring was deafening.

Maybe an optimist can get to happiness from nowhere on nothing. But it seems an impossibility in nature to get there from nowhere on nothing, with no one. Even the dogs, even the cat, would agree.