The Cat Got the Old Coot!
By Merlin Lessler
I’m putting this out here now, well in advance of the actual
event, so you will know what really happened when you read in my obituary that
I had a dizzy spell, fell down the stairs and broke my neck. It won’t be the
truth. It’s the cat that killed me, not a dizzy spell.
It won’t have been a malicious act. It’s just a cat doing
what cats do. They like to follow old coots around and toy with them, the same
way they taunt and tease a mouse. If you get up from your chair to walk out of
a room, a cat will wake from a sound sleep, rush ahead, dive to the floor and
roll over on its back. Directly in line with your next footstep! That’s OK when
the room is well lit and you’re paying attention to where you’re going. You can
spot the cat and step over it, avoiding a hip-breaking tumble to the floor.
But, if the room is poorly lit or if you are reading the paper as you walk,
like old coots often do, you’re in for a long hospital stay. If the cat gets
you on the stairs, you’re done for. I’m forced to walk around the house without
picking up my feet; it’s the only way to avoid injury or death. It’s why old
coots shuffle along, barely lifting their feet. Cats make us walk like that,
not old age.
Our cat, Rosie, named after the great (and now, late) blues
singer, Roosevelt Dean, has a nasty habit of climbing up on the bulletin board
in my office and pulling out a pushpin. He bats it around for a while and then
leaves it in a strategic spot for someone in bare feet to step on. When it
happens to me, I perform an acrobatic leap that more often than not, leaves me
limping. Sometimes he burrows under a throw rug to hide and leaves a big hump
in the middle. The last time he “got” me, I did a back flip, one that would
have most certainly earned a perfect “10” in an Olympic competition.
Our cat has lion DNA. He lurks behind things and leaps up as
I pass by, getting my heart beating so fast I have to sit down. He refuses to
drink water from a bowl, insisting on fresh water from the tap. This works fine
when I remember to turn off the faucet. I’ve flooded the laundry room more than
once when I was distracted and forgot the water was on. There is an angry
debate raging across the country on how to lower the cost of health care. It’s
too complicated for me to know what should be done, but one thing that would
significantly reduce the strain on the system is to cat proof the houses of old
coots. It would save millions in the repair and rehabilitation of broken hips,
wrists, elbows, shoulders and skulls. Of course, it might help if we paid
attention to where we were walking instead of trying to remember why we are
going there.
This column was
originally published in 2009. A good friend of ours, and Roosevelt, recently
adopted him, reserving visitation privileges for us. It was a hard decision,
but since we are away from home for sizable portions of the year, it was the
only one we could make. Rossie never did end up breaking my neck, just my
heart.
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