Someone once asked me what good was a cat? While I am attempting to write this, one of my furry feline companions is draped over my lap, including my left arm, pinning it down on the desk. With the occasional overzealous flick of her gray tail she manages to click the keys on the keyboard in an attempt to make me look like I have a bad case of palsy and the spelling finesse of a four year old. It took my cat a good five minutes of circling and clawing before settling down in her precarious and obviously ill-conceived position that probably greatly contributes to my future diagnosis of carpal tunnel.
So, I guess I can see how someone may ask the question: What good is a cat? To explain why I feel my cats are essential to my wellbeing, I have to introduce them. Sylvanas, named after the banshee queen of the undead from World of Warcraft, was abandoned by her previous owner. She was about a year and a half old when she became ours and lost her unimaginative name of Patty. She is a beautiful silver gray color with a white belly, white paws and a line of white down her nose. Her eyes are green. There are darker gray stripes on her tail. The other cat is Fizgig, named after the orange ball of fur that opens into a mouth in the eighties movie the Dark Crystal. My Fizsgig is also an orange ball of fur with a white chest and belly. She has what appears to be a lions mane, and a tail that could double as a plush feather duster. Her eyes are amber.
Sylvanas, known more commonly as Silly or Sillybear, is the more reserved of the pair. She keeps to herself until you are busy doing something then she insists on being on your lap. She is incapable of settling down without first spending five to ten minutes pacing across your lap, lacerating you with claws in a casual regal manner. She is prone to sleeping on her back with her legs sprawled at strange angles. She eats wires, preferring those connected to expensive hard to replace electronics. We keep hoping she will choose a wire that will be courteous enough to fight back and deliver a small charge, thus teaching the destructive little demon a lesson. She is un-shocked as of yet, and every small wire in my house is duct taped to the wall or floor. And yes, we tried all of those spray on products to protect the wires. They have no effect on her, although when Kyle (my long-time boyfriend) accidentally got some in his mouth, he threw up. (How he managed to accidentally get it in his mouth is another story, and one of the reasons I love him.)
She panics when we move furniture or leave for even a day or so. Her distress obviously includes the eating of some electronic device. She exhibits one very strange behavior that has come in handy. The few times Kyle and I have argued, Sylvanas inserts herself literally between us. The first time she did, Kyle was leaning back on the counter and I was getting in his face, not yelling but having what I will call a ‘discussion’. Silly climbed up Kyle’s jeans and jumped, forcing us to catch her. Each ended up holding one end of the cat who promptly settled on our arms. She has effectively ended more than one ‘discussion’ with her loving diplomacy.
Fizgig is known as Fizzy, Giggles, Gigglepuss, Giggles Mcgee, Gigs, Fitzgerald Von Gigginess, Squeaker, and Demon Spawn. She has taken it upon herself to defeat the evil oppression of gravity. So far she is losing the war but her struggle continues. She makes noise constantly, a variety of odd squeaks, chirps, mews, and inquiries. She runs to the door when I come home and loves being held like a baby on her back.
Fizgig is a cat who gets her head stuck in the slats of the wooden chair backs. On a regular basis she mistakes the fact that she is orange for the false belief that she is on fire. In her panic she runs headlong through the house until a wall stops her. There is not a shelf, table, chair, or raised surface of any kind in my house that she has not fallen off of. I am not sure who determined that cats always land on their feet, but they obviously have never met Fizgig.
One of my favorite Fizgig fail moments involved a knit blanket Kyle’s mother made us. Kyle and I were snuggled under the blanket which is the kind that has a bunch of small holes in it. Fizgig loves to curl up under blankets amongst limbs so she had settled down on my stomach to watch TV with us. But she became convinced that the small holes in the blanket were actually larger than they appeared. She stood up and jumped straight out from the couch. Needless to say the blanket did not disappear as she thought it had. Instead she fell, ending up wrapped in a pocket of blanket hanging over the floor. She began crying in confusion at the invisible blanket, and after being detangled she has yet to go near the offending fabric since.
So back to this great question: What good is a cat? The traditional use is to kill pests, but neither of my little indoor Queens has ever left me a decapitated furry keepsake. Fizgig is too distracted seeing mystical things in the air to notice a mouse, even if said mouse were to saunter up wearing a top hat and tug on her whiskers. If a mouse ever dared approach Sylvanas, one of her truly horrifying death stares would be the end of the poor creature. I myself have had to check for a pulse after being on the receiving end of Silly’s wrathful green eyes.
So my cats don’t kill mice. They wouldn’t alert me if there were a burglar, unless of course it was one of the many figments of Fizgig’s imagination that plague my home. Fizgig, despite being all of seven pounds, has the lungs of a gorilla. She can also throw her voice impressive disconcerting distances. Her love of hiding in cabinets coupled with her knack for voice-throwing has created many a find-the-cat evening.
What good is a cat then if they don’t kill mice and don’t alert you to danger? They are wonderful, if small, space heaters despite the occasional discomfort of kneading claws. They are warm little balls of love and disaster.
My best answer to what good is a cat is laughter. In the three years I have owned my little pair of hellions there hasn’t been a day where they did not make me laugh. The past week alone has been exceptional. Christmas is in seven days. The tree is up, decorations glittering and swinging. Neither of my pampered Princesses has deemed it within her dignity to climb the tree, although I have turned around to see Physgig dangling from the lowest branch, possibly pretending to be a new interactive ornament. No ornaments are hung within their reach to avoid temptation, but green and amber eyes stare at them anyway. Our hopes of the wires in the house fighting back are being boosted by Sylvanas’s obsession with the lighted fake garland. So far her tastes have only run to the fake green fabric of the evergreen, but we are hopeful the wire will soon strike back for all of its fallen comrades.
My favorite Christmas cat memory involves the grace of Fizgig and her never-ending battle to prove Newton was mistaken. There was a decorative shelf above the kitchen counter, one that I had given up placing anything but the cats on. I was making Bon Bon’s (cookies) on the counter, her amber eyes watching my every move, tail twitching. When my attention wavered for too long away from her, she began to roll on the narrow shelf. The spinning of her brain gave her the brilliant idea to try and prove to me for the millionth time that gravity was a bad joke. She rolled right off the shelf and barreled into the box of confectioner sugar that was on the counter. Disgusted at being beaten yet again by gravity, my seven pound furball dragged the box of confectioner sugar, wax paper, and cookie sheet to the floor with her. She carefully planned it out so that the entire box of confectioner sugar spilled out onto the small area rug rather than on the easily cleanable tile of the floor. She sat a moment, pouting, her orange fur liberally dusted in white. Then she was struck with another brilliant idea. She began to roll in the sugar, grinding it into the rug.
I watched all of this from a foot away, laughing like an idiot. Rather than stop the terribly misguided feline, I retrieved my camera and took pictures. Then I picked up my sugar coated mischief maker and deposited her in my boyfriends lap.
I thought I was done with this little bit of cat tribute, but Fizgig has given me more to depict. I had refilled the water dish in the 75 gallon aquarium that houses my tortoise, Houdini. I left the top half open so I could add more water, but forgot. I went to get a drink after I thought I had finished with my writing. A small muffled mew sound drew my attention. Fizgig had fallen into the tortoise tank and was sitting on the wood chips looking out at me with her head cocked to the side. Again, instead of helping the baffled creature I got my camera.
On the day when the man asked me what good was a cat, I didn’t answer. I only smiled.
