I read this morning that cats spend 70 percent of their time sleeping and 15 percent grooming. I had a roommate like that in college. Her grades stunk, but she did look good when she left the room. It's amazing the trouble they (cats and said roommate) can cause in the remaining 15 percent of a day.
I'm watching all three of our cats closely this morning as I play with the word rhythms of a children's book featuring a cat. (I know, Seuss already did it big, but this one is sans chapeau).
My cats are not enjoying the attention. In the absence of a sunbeam for them to stretch and bask on this overcast morning, it's clear they prefer shadows and a private agenda. (I had an ex husband like that, but that really is another story).
There is something undefinable in a cat's actions. The longer I watch, the less their movements make sense ... to me.
Long before Betty Buckley made "Memories" the required tune for half the music boxes shipped into the United States, my grandmother read to me regularly from a theadbare copy of "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" she picked up at a Goodwill store.
She read it the way T.S. Eliot must have meant when he wrote the collection to amuse his godchildren. The first time I saw the play, I didn't hear the stage-trained melodies, but my gramdmother's voice. The six-foot cats dancing and prancing in the aisles were a distraction rather than an enhancement to MY memories.
But the cat on my page has not yet developed a distinctive cadence or style. He's currently bland enough to be a Labrador Retriever (which, while quite adorable, defeats the purpose of making him a cat).
At the moment, the three cats in my living room share entirely too much with Jenny Any Dots, Rum Tum Tugger and MacCavity to help define the paper cat.
A favorite family story has a neighborhood cat terrorizing my cousin Cheryl's flower beds. Her then- preschool son, Connor, decided to take mattters in his own hands by putting on boots and a hat, picking up a ball of string and announcing with absolute resoltuion to the room of assembled family "I'm gonna catch me a cat" as he headed out the door.
Of course, the story ends there with the big round up left to the imagination. That way we come up with our own version of just what he did, or tried to do, with that ball of string.
As if on cue, our lanky, polydactyl, Rum Tum Tugger clone just jumped into my lap, swatted at my fingers on the keyboard, licked my arms and abruptly left.
I hear my grandmother's voice, so carefully purged of her native Polish accent, reciting from memory.
"And that's what makes a cat, a cat."