Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
Crazy cat
Crazy cat
When push comes to shove, a dog is a dog is a dog. Don’t really care if it’s a labradoodle or a pit bull or a Yorkie, a border collie or a husky or dachshund. No matter how much you might think your dog is intellectually superior to the rest of the canine world (and my dog definitely thinks very highly of herself), there will be moments in every day when you realize she’s just a dog. Like all dogs, she will eat anything, and not care what it tastes or feels like. All dogs chase balls. And squirrels. And all dogs are slavish to whoever feeds and/or walks them. Sometimes I despair of dogdom.
The ironic thing, of course, is that while there is wide physical difference between your dog and the one she’s yapping at through the window, while it’s hard to believe a schnauser and a Newfoundland are the same species, all cats look basically alike. There are times when my small white shorthair is prowling along a window ledge, that I can easily imagine her to be a cougar on some mountain crag. She and the tiger or ocelot or the Persian next door are built pretty much the same.
And yet individually, every cat has its uniqueness, its eccentricities. Sure, Puff chases a piece of balled-up paper much as the cat next door does, but the way she handles it once she catches it, or where she hides it, can be marvellously, hilariously special to Puff alone. I’m sure every one of you cat owners out there has your own tales of how your feline has entertained the family with its particular, oddball approach to life. And I’d love to hear those stories sometime, really I would, but does your cat do this:
• Play music on a book? My grandsons have a “Tickle Me, Elmo” book that has a number of pictures along the border. When you get to that picture in the story, you press the one on the border and it makes a particular sound, like birds chirping or cymbals crashing. Well, the boys only visit occasionally, and read “Elmo” even less often, so most of the time, the book just sits on a shelf under a sidetable. Our cat Haiku (named for her smallness and her markings like Japanese writing) was walking across the shelf one night when she accidentally “played” the book. Intrigued, she did it again. Delighted, she did it a third time. After a while, she discovered she could make different noises by walking in different places. Her favourite sound is Elmo’s laugh, so sometimes, if she feels like it, she will poke Elmo’s picture again and again to hear him laugh. One night, I swear she played Elmo fifty times in a row. Cute, but not conducive to sleep.
• Help you brush your teeth? Haiku is not fond of drinking from her dish; she would far rather drink from the bathroom tap. So every time any of the family heads for the bathroom, no matter what our objective might be, she is ready to assist, certain that sooner or later, you’re going to turn on the tap. If you’re brushing your teeth, she will patiently watch you extract the paste and wet the brush, then dart like lightning to drink as soon as you move the brush to your mouth. She is so fond of the tap, in fact, that she camps out on the bottom stair of the short flight that leads from our bedroom, and she has almost been stepped on a dozen times.
• Help you with your paper work? My wife has her home office in the basement, a fair hike from our top-storey bedroom, particularly if you’re a smallish feline. But in the past few weeks, Haiku has apparently decided that my wife needs to keep working through the night. She has begun to haul various items from the desk, or the wastebasket, or the blue box, up the long flight of stairs, through the kitchen, into the bedroom, even up on the bed. At first it was scraps from a notepad, then she progressed to envelopes, then to full sheets of paper. Now she’s dragging entire documents, some almost as heavy as she is, and depositing them on our bed in the middle of the night. If we hear a rustling noise at 5 a.m., we don’t worry about a burglar or a rat; we just wonder what item of stationery our small white beast has decided to fetch this time. Many years ago, we had another cat, Ozzie, who used to make similar trips from the laundry room. We would often wake to discover that a sock, or some underwear, or one time even a toque, had migrated from the basement overnight. Those, at least, were of fabric and didn’t disturb our sleep. When Haiku starts dragging the latest copy of “Hello” or worse yet, the telephone book, up the stairs, you’re going to hear it.
The worst of it is, Haiku is still a youngster; she just turned two. Like all of us, she’s only going to get weirder as she ages. I’ll keep you posted.
