Parakeets and Catnip - An Aside if you Please

Greetings Dear Reader,

Last night I had the honor to substitute in an English composition class. I promised those students that I would post a story I told for them. It is a chapter from my soon to be published new book Sheetrock on the Road. That book is a work of fiction.

Sometimes people have pets. I was never really a pet person but when I was a boy my Grandfather gave me two of Parakeets. One was green and yellow and the other was blue and white. The blue one was friendly and liked to sit on my head. He also liked to nibble the little hairs on my ears. The green one liked to sit on my shoulder and poop down my back. The blue spent a lot more time out of the cage than the green one. I would not want to deceive anyone. I do not spend a great deal of time around anything that poops down my back, but these birds were given to me by my Grandfather shortly before he died and so I viewed them as extensions of his presence in my life.

I fed the birds regularly and what droppings stayed inside the cage landed on the newspaper at the bottom. I mastered the art of changing the paper and cleaning their dishes but could never get them to talk. One rainy afternoon when I was home alone I spent nearly three hours saying “pretty bird” to them in an attempt to get them to talk to me. Not only did they refuse to talk but also later that night I am sure that they agreed that I was dumber than they had first considered. They refused to leave their cage for weeks and I was sure that it was due to my instructive attempts. It was not until later that I correlated their prolonged hibernation with the arrival of my little sister’s new kitten, Calico.

It is a very cruel trick on the part of God that cats start out as kittens. I am sure this is part of the curse. Kittens are cute fur balls with immense appeal and little coordination. The house we lived in had hard wood floors and they were waxed to a shine that you could see yourself in. Those first few weeks of the kitten’s learning his way around the house were fascinating. Calico would bound awkwardly through the house skidding through turns and stops, garnering our love and devotion through gangly tumbles and endearing mews. Being innocent to the ways of cats, I imagined that this behavior would last for ages. The truth is that when God cursed the earth for Adam’s sin, he put into cats an aloofness caught by Kipling so well in his Just So Stories.
Cats think that they own us. They think that they may do as they please and they take revenge on us if we limit their freedom too much. I am not sure what happens, but overnight they change from kittens into wicked deceitful creatures. Once they grow up, they constantly look for ways to remind us that we live only under the delusion of ownership and in truth, we belong to them. They show up as kittens to get their hooks in you and then once they have you, they turn into cats. You get up one morning and the roles have changed, the road is theirs, and the rules are different.

Sometimes they really get the person they overtake under their power. They get the individual to buy them special food and houses full of special cat furniture. On rare occasions, the cat gets the victim, usually a woman; a single woman, to buy other cats. There is probably a secret society of these highly intelligent cats that capture humans so that they can breed in the human’s house. The nice lady starts out with one or two, but they send out their secret society cat code calling all the strays for miles until the poor hostage woman has 32 billion cats in her house. She loses all her friends and the house smells like cat urine and wet hairballs from a mile away. The cats run her life and she keeps harboring more and more of them. Years later, old Miss Cat Lover is found dead and half eaten by her own cats. Then some poor do-gooder adopts the cannibal cats for the sake of being humane.

As I said before, I am not much of a pet person. In fact most of the things I would want around the house are things you cannot pet. Dogs are all right if they can earn their keep. Turtles are hard to keep. Hamsters and gerbils get lost somewhere in the house and you don’t find them until their aroma of decay wafts its way out of the drawer where your mom stores the fine linens. Guinea Pigs make that whining sound that drives one mad and they go off for no apparent reason. Moms do not in general approve of most members of the reptile family, but we will talk more about that later.

I like fish. I like fish a whole lot, but they are more like living art than they are pets. As a matter of fact, as long as you do not get carried away, fish are the perfect pet. You feed them and clean their tank occasionally. You do not have to name them if you do not want to and they pretty much stay where you put them. Oh sure, there is the occasional suicidal tetra that leaps out of the tank in pursuit of some imaginary thing in the water. They always seem to do this while you are at work. The tetra decides to risk it all, jumps out of the water, and you find him dead on the carpet with this look of shock in his eyes. You would think the thing was surprised when it could not breathe the air minus the water.

Cats, however, are on the very bottom of my list of good household pets. Cats are great outdoor pets. If you live on a farm they will eat other potential pets like mice. I believe that indoor cats go insane. A dear friend who loves cats pointed this out to me one day. A mutual friend of ours had an indoor cat that would run all over their little house and scratch anything with a pulse. My friend innocently attributed the cat’s behavior to friskiness. I take exception with this. The cat was mad. It tore up furniture, scratched anyone that it came near and was in general a very irritable demon in silky fur.

Did you know that is costs around $800.00 a year to keep a cat in your house? Of course that assumes that your cat does not need laser eye surgery at $1500.00 an eye or that is does not swallow your nephew and you get sued over it. Americans spend around $10,400,000,000 a year to feed and house animals that tear up their furniture, scratch you at will, and swallow your nephew when you are not looking. Calico was an indoor cat.

You must understand that I witnessed the change. The secret cat society usually kills people that witness the change, but since they cannot read and I have not told anyone until now, I should be safe.[1] I was lying in bed. I had just woken up and saw Calico move from the hall to the doorway of my room. She looked at me with that questioning head tilt that seems to ask things like, “How can you sleep on your back like that, you must be nuts?” At that very moment one of the parakeets decided to chirp out a friendly good morning. Calico’s head snapped in the direction of the birdcage and there was a new gleam in the monster’s eyes that had not been there before this moment. In the mind of the former kitten, I no longer existed. My birds had just become caged prey to the deadly clawed, fanged, slinker. I quickly shooed the cat away and began to leave my bedroom door closed. The vile creature would often lurk outside the door and dart into the room whenever I opened it. Once it actually got as far as the windowsill by the cage. Calico immediately started batting at the cage trying to knock it over. I grabbed the monster by the scruff of the neck and tossed her out into the hallway. The beast landed deftly on its feet, glanced over its shoulder at me, and began licking its ruffled fur in disdain. The murderous cat had decided that the parakeets would be dinner and it was patient. Little did I know that my sister was so under the influence of the malevolent cat society that she would aid and abet this demon with the demise of my birds.

It was one of those sweltering summer days where the air has the texture of warm soggy paper towels. I was on the front porch doing my summer reading for school. The oscillating fan moving the air about was only washing me with tepid air that could neither cool nor refresh. The fan’s sultry drone called me to stretch out and nap instead of attending to my summer duties. My little sister came out on the porch and demanded that I go out in the back yard and spray her with the garden hose. I explained that I had to finish my current session with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle before I could do this and that she should amuse herself for another hour or so. She did.

Had I known the cost of my devotion to reading, I might have abandoned Mr. Holms in favor of my parakeets. Determined to punish me for not obeying her, my sister placed Calico in my room and shut the door. Being a somewhat OK big brother I completed my task and headed for the bedroom to change into my bathing suit. The cold water would do both I and my sister good.
By the time I finished reading about the hounds the cat had done its worst. My first clue that all was not well was the single blue feather that floated from beneath my bedroom door. Opening the door, my eyes locked on the defiant eyes of Calico staring back at me with a green parakeet hanging limply from her mouth. My room was covered with feathers and birdseed. The cat had killed both birds and left me to clean up the mess.

My mother was little help in consoling me that evening and my sister confessed her part in the plot by teasing me about the dead birds. I buried the murdered birds in an old cigar box in the back yard. Even then I was planning my revenge against this murderous member of the malevolent cat society. They say that revenge is a dish best served cold. I think that it is best served as dessert.

Calico loved catnip. The murderous monster was powerless to the scent of the narcotic herb. It did not occur to me until decades later how much the scent of common birdseed resembles catnip. Parakeets must seem like chirping drug fixes to the average cat junkie. I knew that Calico would do anything for catnip.

On Saturday mornings my sister had dance lessons. I was left to myself on Saturdays to enjoy my favorite cartoons and a giant bowl of cereal. As soon as my sister and mom left for dance lessons I headed for the kitchen and retrieved the catnip. A proper description of Calico’s usual reaction to catnip is necessary to fully appreciate the caliber of my revenge. Just a pinch of the dried green weed in the cat’s food would make it run around, roll around, and all around act completely nuts. A touch more of the stuff and the cat would pounce on all sorts of invisible creatures. I had decided to OD the cat on catnip. That the plot turned out badly is regrettable but we are dealing with a mass-murdering member of the malevolent secret cat society.
You see, this cat could hear you open the cat food cabinet from anywhere in the known universe. Since the demise of the parakeets I had taken to opening the cabinet just to make the feline serial killer stop whatever it was doing and run into the kitchen. I often waited until the killer cat had lain down in the sun to nap to open the squeaky cabinet and rouse the beast.
Today I upended the box of catnip onto the floor just as Calico entered the room. The scent of catnip instantly overpowered the malicious fiend. The cat pounced at the small green pile and began to roll over and over in it. She sat up and yowled as if calling all other cats to witness her immense treasure in controlled substances.[2] Calico began to run a circuit through the house, skidding like a kitten on the hardwood floors, yowling and mewing alternately. On her last lap through the dining room she misjudged her speed and momentum. I am sure that drug abuse had clouded Calico’s judgment, sped up her movement, and slowed her reactions. She probably should not have been driving. Anyway, she collided with the door jam at full speed.
A dull pop came out of the cat’s body and it bounced backwards from the door frame. There was no movement after that. Calico was dead and I was in trouble. I had to find a way not to be caught with the proverbial canary (read parakeet) in my mouth.

I quickly scooped up Calico and hurried down to the street. I carefully place her limp form between two parked cars to make it look as if she had been hit while darting between them. When sis arrived home she found the cat and assumed that it had darted out when she and mom left the house. I have never told my sister about killing Calico and it was an accident. The deception that followed was more self-preservation than anything else.

Ironically, we buried Calico in the back yard not too far from her victims. My sister soon recovered and we obtained another kitten. She named it Demon. I developed a severe allergy to cats and cannot be around them for very long without medication.

I know that cats all over the world approach me when I am around them. The want me to pet, scratch, or otherwise interact with them. I am sure it is a test to see if I am among the ranks of those sought for crimes against cats everywhere. I am also sure that there are faceless wanted posters up in the secret cat society meeting places with my real name on them.

[1] This is one of the reasons I write under a nom-de-plum (pen name). If the cats can read they will not know who I really am, and so cannot hunt me down, kill me, and have my wife adopt a half billion of them for revenge.

[2] This makes me wonder if the secret cat society is not really in charge of all drug import into
America. Perhaps there is an international cartel of drug smuggling cats. It could all be a plot to enslave us so we will not spay or neuter them. Perhaps an allergy to cats is nature’s way of preventing them from gaining dominance. They do so much to control us. They have even gone so far as getting people to drink coffee that has been through the digestive tract of a wild cat called a Civet. People pay $800 a pound for this cat poop coffee. From herbs to coffee, cats seem to have more than just a passing interest in the drug industry. They may be the root of it. It’s a theory.

Wishing you joy in the journey,

Aramis ThornMat 13:52 So Jesus said to them, "That is why every scribe who has become a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like a home owner. He brings new and old things out of his treasure store."