Lucy Lucille Lupe

Chadsford Hall lay drowsing in the sunshine. Heat mist shimmered above the smooth lawns and the timbered terraces. The air was heavy with the lulling drone of insects. It was the most gracious hour of a summer afternoon, midway between lunch and tea when Nature kicks her shoes off and puts her feet up.

I was enjoying the shade of the cypress grove, near the rhododendrons, opposite the camelia glade. While sipping the contents of a tall, tinkly glass, and reviewing the latest acting-up of the social quality in the pages of The Independent, I was startled to hear a voice coming from a rhododendron that had until now remained speechless.

"Whatcha doin'?"

As soon as I regained my composure, if any, and restored calm to the mind, if it is a mind, I gave the offending shrub a stern look of censure. Wouldn't you? I saw that the bush was giving me the same. Not the bush in fact but something peering from it. It might have been a wood nymph for I couldn't see it clearly, but I thought not. As it happened, I was right.

"Sorry, sir," said the year-old Siamese kitten, the one I've named Lucy Lucille Lupe because Old Possum says that cats require three names. Ms Wonder tells me that Mr Possum had something entirely different in mind but So what is my comeback to that. I reserve the right to take the road less traveled sometimes. Napoleon, I believe, did the same.

 "Didn't mean to startle you," said L. L. Lupe.

"Not at all," I said having immediately forgotten the annoyance I felt at being shaken from a pleasant semi-slumber of the afternoon because this Lucy Louise fosters a warm, soft spot in the center of my chest near the heart. "It's good to see you again."

She did a little dance, her front paws moving two steps to the left and then two steps back to the right while the rear feet moved to a different rhythm entirely. I know this particular dance well, and I interpret it to mean, I like you because you give me good things to eat but, oooh! you've got big feet and I'm so small. I'm not fluent in the language of dance, of course, I offer only the gist of meaning.

"Got something to eat?" she seemed to say.

"It's not dinner time," I said.

"What's that?" she said adding a new step to the dance.

"I'm stroking your back," I explained.

"Don't touch me please," she seemed to say.

"OK, if you don't like it," I said and I stopped immediately. Protocol is very important to cats because there was a time when they were worshiped as gods and they haven't forgotten it.

"If not today, then maybe tomorrow," I said.

"Don't think about tomorrow," she said.

"Yes, I read about that somewhere. I don't mean to say it was about cats only. If memory serves, birds and lilies were mentioned too."

"Birds! Love birds!," she said turning round and round hoping to see them, I'm sure. "Where are they? By the bird bath?"

"I don't see any bathing just now," I said, "but don't distract me, I'm trying to remember something I heard when I was just so high. Probably not much bigger than you."

"Me? You were never my size," she said.

"Where was I?" I said.

"Birds!" she said.

"Right, birds. The passage I'm trying to remember went something like this, Behold the birds, for they sow not, neither do they reap, something, something, something--and then, pay close attention because the big payoff is coming up--take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for itself. I'm paraphrasing of course."

"That's me," she said.

"I thought as much," I said and I was being sincere about it. These cats have never completely given up their wildness and it's my position that their popularity has something to do with a human being's desire to fondle a tiger.

She stretched her front legs out and bent the body into the stretch. Her butt was high in the air, as high as it goes rather, and her tail pointed skyward. She was lovely. She was beautiful. She was so delightful that nothing else was required of her to be perfect in my esteem.

"Think I'll take a nap," she said and sauntered off toward the rhododendron.

It seemed a good idea and I decided to do the same. Perhaps I would dream of a perfect world, where no cat suffers from human malice, for as Robert Heinlein put it, "How we behave toward cats here below determines our status in heaven." 

I like that. I keep it in mind always. I suggest you do the same.

Modern Life and Cats

"Modern life is not a lot of fun if left to its own devices," I said to Ms. Wonder and I felt it to the core.

"You seem low-spirited," she said and I think I've made it pretty clear that it was so. I was as low-spirited as I could stick even though Uma, Queen of Cats and Empress of Chatsford Hall lay at my feet doing an impersonation of an eel out of water in the hope, no doubt, of receiving a treat for the effort.

Empress Uma Maya 

"No, Poopsie, modern life is not much fun at all. Consider how Napoleon must have felt when Nelson sailed the British fleet into Cairo Bay and burned the French navy. Couldn't have been pleasant for him."

Sagi (Sagitarius) M'tesi

"It must have been much the same for Peter II when Catherine the soon to be Great, led the Russian army to the Winter Palace where he was in residence. No," I said, " modern life is just one damned thing after another, just as Shakespeare told us."

She gave me a quizzical look and I realized that she was about to interrupt my soliloquy with some drivel about Shakespeare but I wasn't done yet. I continued.

Beignet Lafayette

"But instead of searching for the silver lining of life's muddle-headedness, do you know what most people do? They get all hotted up and the pressure builds until they start leaking at the seams. You can find them grinding teeth and clenching fists and giving passersby a look that could open oysters at 20 paces. Only makes things worse, if you ask me."

I waited for her response, one that would make me feel that we commiserated if that's the word I'm looking for, but she didn't say anything, just gave me what passes with her as a compassionate look.

Lucy Lucille Lupe 

I remember thinking that brown eyes do a better job of portraying compassion than green eyes, but then it isn't her fault that she has the eyes of an elf, and besides, I knew what she meant. 

"Something really should be done before it's too late," I said.

"Done?" she said. "You mean something to change the general attitude of people you meet? Do you think that's possible?"

"Thank you for asking," I said. "I really would like to see people sweeten up a bit and I think I have the perfect antidote to whatever it is that poisons their outlook."

"Go on," she said.

"P.G. Wodehouse," I said. "It's imperative, the way I see it, that modern man, and woman too if she cares to join us, read Wodehouse to learn the importance of aunts, or rather, the importance of avoiding them."

Abbie (Abracadabra) Hoffman 

"But not cats," she said, always having her finger on the nub. "People must realize the importance of socializing with cats."

"Cats to be sure," I said. "Of what value would life be without cats? I mean, what's the point?"

We began to discuss the Wodehouse cannon and the relative importance of aunts and cats but somewhere along the way, and I'm not sure exactly where it occurred, I began talking about my own writing, and my hope that perhaps I could help supply some relief to pedestrians as they navigate life's potholes.

Eddy Spaghetti 

"I've paid my dues, the way many writers do, and I feel it's time I give back some of what I've learned," I said. "I shall stick to writing about what I know, which is normal life, or in the words of George Costanza, nothing at all, because that's what I know best. 

I'm as apolitical as an oyster but I'm not naive, at least I don't think so. I hope that I can follow in the great man's footsteps--I allude again to P.G.--and produce quality work in my latter years, just as he produced in his. Neither he nor I peaked early."

"I hope you consider offering spiritual guidance to your readers," she said.

"Not as such," I said. "My stories will be in the context of my own spiritual outlook but I will not be explicitly spiritual. I don't care to be preached at and I don't intend to engage in the practice. I have some knowledge of the Bible due simply to the age in which I grew up. We memorized and quoted Bible versus in primary school and I can nail down an allusion as quickly as Jael, the wife of Heber, who was always driving spikes into the coconuts of overnight guests.

"The plots I prefer are much the same as those of Shakespeare's comedies. The foibles of love and the antics of those trying to win or escape from love's embrace. There will be a scarcity of mothers and fathers, only because of my own upbringing, but a pile of aunts, uncles, and cousins, of which I had so many that laid end to end would stretch from here to the next presidential election."

"And cats," she said as Abbie Hoffman, who had just wandered into the room, and apparently decided that the number of felines in attendance exceeded the fire marshal's recommendations. He left the way he came.

"Absolutely cats," I said. "Cats add value to any subject and the absence of cats wounds even the best literature."

We both mused on this concept for several minutes, cats being a deep subject and a wide one too.

"I shall attempt to apply what I have learned from the master," I continued, "and use metaphor to the fullest extent. From bees fooling about in the flowers to the stars being God's daisy chain. I hope I can do it. I've certainly marinated myself in his works--not God's but Wodehouse's. I do hope so. These are truly troubling times we live in and we must battle the powers of darkness before we are undone."

"Excellent plan," she said. "I can't wait to see where this new path leads."

"Me too," I said and I meant it like the dickens!

It Was Raining Cats

You may remember that I woke a few days ago with a sharp attack of euphoria. In fact, I don't remember a sharper. This morning, however, the sharp attack that woke me involved scimitars and sabers. Actually, scimitar-curved claws and saber-sharp fangs. 

It was the foster kitten, Eddy, who had been working on his stalking skills and killer instinct. Unfortunately, he's hanging at the corner with Abbie Hoffman, a bad influence if ever. No, not that A. Hoffman! I refer to the cat dressed in formal wear and known on the street as Abracadabra.

Eddy (L) and Lucy (R)

It was Eddy, you will remember, who got me in the fleshy part of the toe, causing me to shoot six inches off the mattress. Not an easy feat when starting from the prone position. My convulsions shook him loose but left him giving me the eye while digging his front paws into the duvet with an expression on his map like that of a Baptist deacon rebuking sin.

"Poopsie," I said. No response.

"Ms Wonder," I said louder.

"Whumpf?" came the muffled response from nearby.

"Will you please capture your cat?" I said.

"What?" she said. It occurred to me that she wasn't demonstrating her commitment to our vows to stand by and summon the U. S. Marines for aid and comfort in times of trial.

"Eddy is what I mean. Will you get him off me!"

"I'm asleep," she said.

I thought about pointing out that technically she was not asleep but decided to give it a miss. At that moment I realized that Eddy's behavior had attracted the attention of his sister, Lucy, who is an accomplished little foot ninja in her own right.

"Do you have a towel handy?"

Wonder stirred from the depths of the bedding, raised her head, and asked, "Why would I have a towel?"

"It's just that I'm remembering the time you captured another foster kitten in that you-can't-do-that-here manner by using a towel in the way some Roman gladiators used a fishing net. Remember?"

"I don't have a towel," she said. "And it wasn't a fishing net."

And so there I was, Heir of the Ages, one of the highest expressions of life on earth, and I was being chivvied by one of the lessor. If you are a member of the Inner Circle, you will no doubt recognize this as another example of a tiger living like a goat. I mean where is the benefit of being human when you're constantly being harassed by kittens?

It occurred to me that prompt steps through the proper channels were called for. But it's never that easy, is it? I remember something from my senior year in high school--a Shakespeare play I'm sure, that went something like this:

Between the first thought of doing something dreadful and the actual doing of it (some guff about the genius and mortal instruments), there is often a revolt in the kingdom or words to that effect.

Well, that's where I found myself. My genius, if I can call it that, knew what had to be done, but my arms were not happy about it. I wonder if the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak applies here? Quite possibly, but I'm jumping the rails again.

What I'm trying to say is that it wasn't easy to act. I'd rather go back to sleep. But after those moments of hesitation,  I threw the coverlets back, which I might mention caused it to rain cats. It was a sight to see, let me tell you. 

I gathered Eddy as he turned to flee and I decanted him into the Saigon room for safekeeping.

"That cat should be bedded in the stables," I said to Ms Wonder. "You and I can take care of ourselves but consider what might happen if one of the cleaning crew, exhausted from working her two jobs each day, stretched out on the bed to shut her eyes for a spell. I don't like to dwell on the aftermath, do you?"

But Ms Wonder wasn't in sight. I heard the bathroom door close and soon after the sound of running water, similar to a waterfall filled the silence.

Uma Maya the brindled little Empress of Chatsford was surely in the sale de bains with Wonder. Eddy was safely confined to the Saigon room. Lucy was probably hiding underneath the bed. 

Beignet, the ginger and white ragamuffin, and Sagi, the caramel-colored tabby, were at my feet looking up at me to ask, what next? Abbie was absent but I expected he could be found in his usual spot for this time of morning, atop the kitchen cabinets. Suddenly I was acutely aware of the tie that binds and the words of a close friend who often says, "The family we choose is the most pleasing."

Looking down at the two cats sitting at my feet I said, "Stand by to counsel and advise." Fortunately for me, they have all provided just what I needed in the fullness of time.