The Trials of a Fluffy Kitty

First of all, Happy Birthday to Alexander H., born on Nevis January 11, 1757. To begin, I will post a quote of his that feels utterly relevant.

"...a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that ... those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants."  ~~The Federalist Papers


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The trials of a fluffy kitty...



Here is the "Fluffy Kitty" the day she came to us as a baby, a bitten-up kitten who had just been to the vet so he could drain an abscess from a bite. 

My husband and I have learned a lot about her over the years both by observation and by inference. Kimi is the only one who could call us on any of these suppositions, but she's not talking, except for the ever-useful word "meow." 

That's what she said to my friend Patti who found her on the porch of her Palmyra house on a cold December day. Kimi was hungry and cold and Patti could see her ribs through the fluff, and also see that she'd been hurt. Hundreds of $$ of vet bills and a few days later, Patti brought Kimi to me. Patti already had three indoor cats in her double wide. She was was still covered with ticks, in her ears, her paws and just everywhere. Patti and I stopped counting after we'd removed thirty.

Life for her improved after that, for, with antibiotics and wounds stitched, she was already on the path to better health. We had a set-back, though, when the abscess had to be drained again. My husband and I soon learned that this little girl had been badly handled by whoever had originally “been responsible” for her -- before they'd decided to throw her away. 

I've come to believe that this is her story. As little kitten, she must have been a yellow fluff ball, looking more like a stuffed toy than a living being. This had led some cat-ignorant people to treat her like one. They'd probably allowed their children to tease her, chase her, and handle her far beyond her ability to endure. If Kimi was already a shy kitten, (and some kitties are emotionally fragile) this man-=handling must have pushed her beyond endurance. She became the hissing, clawing, fearful little girl who first came to live with us.



Kimi was definitely not a fan of being touched, not unless she initiated contact herself. If you reached out to pet her, you'd better come at her slowly and touch gently. Otherwise, there there'd be a steam-kettle worthy (dragon worthy?) hiss and she'd speedily decamp, glaring over her shoulder at the clod human who'd displeased her. She distrusted our other cats too, unsurprisingly, as she'd been beaten up and bitten while trying to get food at some stray cat feeding spot. 

None of the other cats who lived here liked her. She wouldn't play, she wouldn't accept an introductory sniff or lick; she wouldn't play or share the food bowl or space on the couch or be any fun at all. She was just plain scared, and her obvious fear made her a target for our top cat, a large streetwise male. There were periods when she spent most of her time hiding out in a grungy pile of rags in a basement box. In fact, she came darn close to becoming known as "Basement Cat."  




I began to coax her to come upstairs and sit with me, and then into accepting grooming, which her long hair definitely required. I bought a wide-toothed dog brush to start, so that it would pass easily through her thick, matted fur without tugging.  This way we began to break the ice. 

Gradually, she began to believe my intentions were good. After all, her  fluff was too dense for her to care for by herself. As all cat owners should know, hairballs are a standard problem for cats. Nature obliges felines to groom thoroughly every day. All that hair goes in, but if it doesn't come out one end or the other, then the cat will be sick, sometimes fatally. Brushing and combing are a daily must, especially for such a fluffy kitty. 



We'd brush until we'd get a growl. Nail clipping was the same--a few at a time. At first, these beauty treatments were all trials for Kimi, but slowly this necessary handling became routine. 



We still wait until she approaches us for attention and then obey the message of the tail lash which signals "ENOUGH." Her only significant daily trial is Anthony. He arrived last year, absolutely certain that all the other cats must be dying to play with him—and if they refused, he’d chase them all over the house mercilessly. I think, however, that "still he persisted" might win the day, even faced with her determined suspicion.  

Who can say? She may yet learn to enjoy the company of the other cats.

~~Juliet Waldron

Harlots & Nightingales

Nightingale, her Lovers & Mozart

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 Buried in the depths of Hulu is a series based on Harris's Guide to the Ladies of Covent Garden, an erotic guide book to the prostitutes who worked the area. This little magazine was issued every year, at a cost 2 shillings + in London during the period 1757-1795. As the charms and specialities of each woman were described in sometimes graphic detail, it was titillating reading in and of itself. 

Having spent a lot of time imagining exactly that time period in the course of working on various novels, I was instantly drawn in. As befits a British production, the costuming and the opening street scenes on the poor side of town were thrillingly authentic, full of piss, drunks, poverty and danger. I confess, I'm completely addicted to Harlots, which has more engaging characters and more twists, turns and heart-breaks in one episode than some series contain in an entire season. 

Way beyond the soft core flash, Harlots is genuine women's history, served straight up. (!) It's written by women and a stern female gaze informs every scene and every line of dialogue. It made me realize, so much more than the tepid statement: "women had no property rights," that these women were property/chattel, just like their client's carriage horses. 

A woman belonged to her father until she belonged to her husband. If she was married off to a gross rich old man or to a violent young one, she might still be lucky enough to become a widow. Only then would she have a chance to control her own life. In a terrific scene at the end of the first series, an aristocratic woman confides that she doesn't care who killed her husband, but if his whore knows who did, she only wants to say "thank-you."

The best a harlot could hope for was a rich and congenial "keeper," a man who would protect what belonged (often by contract) to him. During Georgian times, in London, one in five women was engaged in the sex trade. There were many sociological factors bringing this heart-breaking statistic about, but whatever was the cause, young women flooded into town from impoverished rural families looking for work as domestics. Even if they were fortunate enough to avoid being recruited or even kidnapped for sex work, they were utterly dependent and could easily be forced into sex with their masters. The practice survives today, in the form of workplace sexual harassment.  

If you think those bad old days are over, take a look at the headlines in the past few years about the trials of women working in the entertainment (and the infotainment) businesses. This also happens in the course of ordinary employment, in offices, in restaurants, where tipped workers are paid (in my state $2.83/hr.) and in factories where women, in ever increasing numbers, have gone to work.  One reason for the vulnerability of working women is because even college educated women are not paid what men are paid for producing exactly the same work. Moreover, the color of your skin decides exactly how much less than a man you will earn. Poor women discover that they can make a great deal more "on the game" than working at a minimum wage job, so, if they are young or need to make their own hours because their children are young and daycare impossible because of cost, sex work might still seem to be the only option. 

My Mozart

The Viennese novels I've written are about the morally sketchy entertainment business, true then as now. Singers, actresses, and dancers enjoy fame and a bit of fortune while their looks and physical abilities last, but in the 18th Century they were never considered "respectable." Glamour and charisma brought wealthy men routinely into a talented woman's orbit. In a time when rich men routinely took mistresses, (and I'm sure it's not any different today) these talented women were collected by gentlemen as objects that proved status and virility--a virility often lodged only in their bank accounts.

My heroines, born poor and talented, Maria Klara and Nanina Gottlieb, live in a world where they always walk a cliff path way, the kind with a crumbling edge and an abyss beneath. Men take them for harlots simply because of their profession. Maria Klara is, quite literally, the property of a dissolute music-loving aristocrat. Her career as well as her comfort depend upon her powerful Count's good will and her ability to please him--both on stage and in his bed. Escape from her gilded cage seems utterly impossible.

Nanina, her family impoverished by the death of her father, barely escapes being turned out by her own mother. Lost virginity was the end of respectability, and, with that went the only other option for a woman in the 18th Century--marriage. Wife or Prostitute were woman's choices, unless she had money of her own sufficient to survive upon.  Artists like Mozart lived on the edge of this fast and loose theatrical world; Papa Leopold Mozart's letters are full of exhortations and warnings to his precious, susceptible son on the subject of whores, who might also be talented prima donnas, the kind of women who have passed through the hands of many men.

Mozart's Wife

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~~Juliet 

Poop Detail

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"Women's work is never done" goes the old saying. Women's work also, seems to me, to be heavily oriented toward cleaning up stuff that comes out of other people (or pets) in one form or another. Tina Faye told Jerry Seinfeld on a recent "coffee date" that at her house "I am in charge of feces." 

I burst out laughing when I heard that, as it's all too familiar to me, and, I'm sure, to women everywhere. At least, familiar to the kind of ordinary women who don't have servants.

Back in baby days, I was the caregiver--as the task is now called. Husband at work, Mom at home, that's the way it was for some years. I cooked, cleaned, washed dishes and clothes and wiped away spit-up and freshened adorable baby butts--which become far less adorable when they are covered in you know what and need a good wash and dry before you can begin to contemplate putting a diaper back on. In the meantime, the boys might also send a high pressure jet across the room, a hazard I (an infant care novice) learned about the hard way.

These days it's just the usual housework--babies and their cute butts are long gone from my life--but that doesn't mean my woman's work poop detail has ended. There are still bathrooms and more particularly toilets that require not-that-pleasant close up work. As I scrub, I often remember working as a waitress long ago in a little restaurant where we had to clean the bathrooms after closing. The ladies who didn't sit could make quite a mess. The gentlemen's room, though, could be extra special sometimes, despite a sign over the hopper which admonished: "We aim to please. YOU AIM TOO PLEASE." 

Long ago

Besides human clean up, there's cat clean up too, at our house. We have three cats, all indoor these days, for their safety and for the safety of the local chipmunks, squirrels, moles and birds. There are other outside cats around here devouring everything in sight, but at least my three are no longer part of the general extermination. Our newest, Tony, is a small healthy young cat, but, I swear, this guy counts as at least two cats when it comes to his box filling abilities. I may miss days at the gym, but as long as I have to lug kitty litter into the house and then back out again on a daily basis, I think I'm nevertheless keeping up with my weight lifting.

Whenever I'm inclined to feel sorry for myself, I tell myself to imagine what the "good old days" must have been like for women. Today, most of us have hot and cold running water in good supply; we have washers and dryers and laundry products galore. But in the 18th Century this was not the case. A diaper change is the kind of day-in-a-life task a middle class woman might have to regularly undertake.

So here's a little slice of A Master Passion, where Elizabeth Schuyler tends the newest Hamilton baby, James. It's already a busy day when her sister Peggy visits unexpectedly.

The whining from the next room suddenly grew to a wail. James, when his first grumbling summons hadn’t been answered, was angry now. With a sweep of skirts, Betsy marched into the room, scooped her howling son from his cradle and plumped herself down in a comfortable wing chair. Her mother would never have undertaken such a task in the good parlor. After all, with a new baby, the risks of spills from one end and leaks from the other were high, but Betsy couldn’t bring herself to walk another step. As a piece of insurance, however, she snatched up his flannel wrap.

Unbuttoning her dress, she got bellowing Jamie in place, experienced the sharp tug and the answering flesh gone-to-sleep prickle of the let-down. Then, one end of the cloth pressed to stem the flow from the neglected breast and the rest tucked strategically around James, she watched her newest son’s jaw work as he mastered the initial tide. He was round and fair, even balder than Angelica had been, but a similar halo of red fluff had begun to rise upon his pink skull. As different in some ways as the children were, there was a certain sameness in the general outline: gray eyes, long heads, a kiss of red in their hair.

Betsy leaned back, relaxing into the comforts of nursing, when she heard a knock at the door.

“Davie!” When she called out, James startled. “Una! Gussie! The door!”

In stretching for the bell on the end table, she dislodged James. He promptly set up a renewed cry at this sudden, rude interruption of his dinner.

“Temper, temper!” Betsy rubbed his open mouth—and the yell—against the nipple. She noticed, with amusement, that his bald head instantly went scarlet with rage.

She decided to ignore whoever it was. If they wanted in badly enough, they’d go around to the kitchen. Then she heard rapid footsteps in the hallway, the sound of Davie running, followed by voices. Soon, the parlor door opened and Peggy poked her head in.

“May I?”

“Of course, Peg. Heavens! I didn’t know you were in town.”

“It was spur-of-the-moment. Stephen is having trouble with Mr. Beekman and decided to come down and straighten it out face to face. I thought I’d come too and see what’s in the shops. The first of the London fashions are arriving.”

During this speech, her younger sister settled on the facing sofa. She was very much the lady of leisure, in a gown of peach satin layered over an ivory petticoat upon which hundreds of tiny birds in flight had been painted. As she removed the long pins which held her broad-brimmed straw hat, she revealed a wealth of chestnut hair.

“Davie says I just missed Colonel Hamilton.”

“Yes. Not half an hour since he rode off with John Jay and Cousin Bob Livingston. I confess I’m worried about what will happen in the legislature. There are only nineteen men who are for the new Constitution.”

“I am concerned, too, though I’ve never really understood politics. Still, we’ve all had an education in the science of government. Papa, for one, is absolutely relentless on the subject.”

“Yes, that’s all Alexander ever talks about, too, either to me or anyone else.”

“Well, thank heaven there are women to keep the day to day world going ’round.”

Peggy moved closer to get a good look at the new baby. He was now happily gulping again.

“What a big strong fellow! I swear, Sis, you’re as good at this as Mama ever was.”

Although their eighth anniversary wouldn’t come until Christmas, James made the fourth little Hamilton. Peggy, on the other hand, had carried only one, Stephen, the precious son and heir to the ancient line of van Rensselaer. There had been nothing afterward but a sad string of miscarriages.

The very elegant Angelica Schuyler Church, maid and baby

Mindful of her sister’s feelings, Betsy simply said, “Thank you, Sis.” She sat Jamie up and patted his back. As he slumped into her hand, his big eyes goggled.

“That one is going to take after Mr. Hamilton for sure. Look at those blue eyes.”

“Well, perhaps. But our babies seem to come fair and then darken up, all except for our Angelica.”

“Are she and Phil upstairs?”

“Yes.”

“Well, in a minute send one of your girls to bring the darlings down to their adoring aunt.”

Tea came in, with Una’s thoughtful addition of some fine English sweet biscuits that had recently arrived from London, sent by Angelica Church.

“Shall I take James, Missus?”

“No, he’s quiet and you’ve got enough going on. Where is Alex?”

“He be watchin’ Gussie scrub.”

“I’ll take care of Jamie,” Betsy instructed, “but if you hear Fanny squawk, let me know.”

Peggy poured tea while Betsy laid the flannel upon the upholstered sofa and then proceeded to quickly change James atop it.

“You are a lucky girl, you know.”

Betsy looked up from wiping a pasty yellow smear from Jamie’s cherub’s bottom.

Peggy giggled. “Why, I mean Alexander the Great, of course. He’s a kind of knight of the round table in our benighted modern age. Papa is quite tiresome on the subject.”

“True, but being the wife of Alexander the Great isn’t easy. I mean, look.” Betsy gestured at the little parlor with its few furnishings.

“Money isn’t everything.”

“Only to those who have enough.” Betsy wrapped the diaper up carefully before setting it on the floor. “And I don’t think I shall ever get used to living in this city. There are times when I do so envy you. Your husband is with you almost all the time instead of riding off on crusades. Even when Hamilton is at home, half the time he’s tied up in knots and might as well not be here at all. Day and night are the same to him when he’s working. This whole winter and spring it’s been nothing but those Federalist Papers..."

~~Juliet Waldron

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The Intimate Mozart

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Sadly, the book with the perfect title, Mozart's Wife, has had to be issued with a new name, owing to shenanigans on the part of a monstrously large retailer whose name I shall not speak. I wrote this book quite some years ago, now in the last century.  

What began for me as a Mozart obsession soon became entangled with the story of the women who lived with a genius for nine short years, and who took his Viennese rocket ride to fame and fortune and crashed into poverty beside him. This little woman, who was even more diminutive than her vertically challenged husband, saw our hero at his best and at his worst. Her name was Constanze, or, using the German spelling: Konstanze. In his letters, Mozart often called her "Stanzi" or "Stanzerl" when he wasn't teasing her about her "Needle Nose."

It began with a romance, as this least favored of the Weber daughters married her big sister's erstwhile boyfriend, a young fellow who'd been a wunderkind and who was now attempting to be taken seriously as an adult musician. It appears that Mozart suffered from all the familiar problems of a child star attempting to bridge the gap. Accustomed as he had been to fame and adulation from his earliest years, this was made supremely difficult, not only because of Mozart’s own high opinion of himself, but because of the understandable resentment of older musicians who believed they had achieved official appointments “the hard way.”

I found that many of Mozart’s biographers had no love for Constanze. They either belittled her as someone who abandoned her man when the going got rough—as things certainly did in the later years in Vienna—or they dismissed her as a silly young woman from an insignificant family who’d married a genius she was ill-prepared to handle. I immediately doubted the “insignificant” part, at least in terms of the Weber family’s musicianship. Constanze’s two older sisters became famous singers, performing the most demanding vocal music of the day—some of it written specifically for them by their brilliant brother-in-law.

Mozart’s largest problem in finding financial security was that upon voluntarily leaving the Archbishop of Salzburg’s service, he became the first freelance musician (of any stature) in Europe. With an almost impenetrable class system in 18th Century Europe, he paid a high price for his daring. No nobleman could allow such an insult to pass, because in those days, "inferior"  was what musicians, no matter how brilliant, were. (Every great musician who came after him, even the fiercely proud and independent Beethoven, would carry the image of Mozart’s rebellion like a banner.)

It is a modern axiom that “anonymous was a woman,” and so it proved to be as I searched for facts about Constanze among a host of biographies. In the second volume of The Mozart Family Letters,* I found many written by Mozart himself, most sent from Vienna to his father in Salzburg. They make good reading, for Wolfgang was a witty observer. These letters may be the horse’s mouth in one sense, however, we must also bear in mind that they were also carefully tailored to soothe the recipient, the stern and possessive Leopold.

Leopold Mozart had not spent his life schooling and grooming Wolfgang for the pure pleasure of the exercise. He always hoped that his son would receive a good appointment at an important Court and would then be able to support his parents in high style. An early marriage—to anyone, much less to a penniless girl with no useful social connections—was not his plan.

When Mozart began to lodge with the Weber’s, tongues began to wag. Despite the expense, slowness, and difficulty of communication in the late 18^th Century, Leopold Mozart seems to have had a network of informants who were only too happy to supply him with information that the proud old man would find disagreeable.  And by simply looking the other way, it was easy enough for the recently widowed Mama, Cecelia Weber, to allow Mozart to compromise Constanze. What amounts to a shotgun wedding was eventually forced with connivance between the widow and a court-appointed guardian.  

 “But who is the object of my love? Again, do not be horrified, I beg of you! Not one of the Webers? Yes, eine Weberische—Constanze, the middle one...my dear good Constanze, she ….is the best of them all. She makes herself responsible for the whole household, and yet she can never do right! …One thing more I must tell you, which is that I was not in love at the time of my resignation. It was born of her tender care and service when I lodged in their house…” 

Stanzi wanted to escape her domineering and critical mother; Mozart hoped to take a wife and have a safe and comfortable home to return to after his battles with the world. He looked forward to having his supper fixed, his clothes cleaned, pressed and mended. He seems to have not thought much about the expenses of a family, nor about the inevitability of children nor any of the difficulties of marriage.

The Mozart’s union took a classic form—young people wanting to escape from restrictions and injustices at home. Wolfgang and his Constanze jumped out of the frying pan of parental domination into the fire.

 Another feature of Constanze’s life is rarely mentioned by Wolfgang’s biographers, one I came to believe that this was the key to her story. Frau Mozart was pregnant or convalescent from childbirth for six years out of the nine she was married to Wolfgang. The longest interval between pregnancies was seventeen months, the shortest (on two occasions) six months. In 1789 she was bedridden. Her legs swelled, she had intermittent fevers and a terrible pain in her legs and abdomen throughout the entire pregnancy. The daughter she bore that year died at birth and very nearly took her mother with her.

From the letters, and from what I’ve read to research the symptoms, it would appear that Constanze nearly died of puerperal fever on two separate occasions. Childbirth and the resulting illnesses brought doctors, midwives, wet-nurses, and prescriptions--and expense. It would be difficult, even today, to keep a woman with such an obstetrical record “in good general health.” 

All large European cities were dirty. There were backhouses behind crowded apartment buildings. What this meant for the summer water supply is not hard to guess. The brief life of four of Mozart’s children and the illnesses of the parents were not unusual. However, it can only be imagined how difficult the birth and death of four infants in such a short space of time was for a young mother.

“My dear wife….will make a full recovery from her confinement. From the condition of her breasts I am rather afraid of milk-fever. And now the child has been given to a foster-nurse against my will, or rather, at my wish! For I was quite determined that whether she should be able to do so or not, my wife was never to feed her child. Yet I was equally determined that my child was never to take the milk of a stranger! I wanted the child to be brought up on water, like my sister and myself. However, the midwife, my mother-in-law ... have begged and implored me not to allow it, if only for the reason that most children here who are brought up on water do not survive as the people here don’t know how to give it properly. That induced me to give in, for I should not like to have anything to reproach myself with.”

It was a good thing that Mama Cecelia, tactful for once, managed to persuade Mozart that babies cannot live on sugar water, whatever wicked nonsense Leopold had retailed! The wet nurse system being what it was, women took on more babies than they could feed in return for the pittance they were paid. The more I learned, the less surprised I was that only two of the six Mozart babies Stanzi bore in the nine years of their marriage survived to adulthood. 

This letter changed my focus once and for all. All I could see was Stanzi, no doubt ill-prepared and injured by the rigors of childbirth, now ordered not to nurse her child--and being sickened with milk fever as a result--by a man who apparently lived in a dream world. Genius or not, my musical hero had feet of clay. Sisterhood is Powerful!

The emotional toll of so many births and deaths had to be great.  I cannot imagine that Constanze ever felt very well—or was able to function efficiently on any level—while her husband’s moods swung from despair to elation and back again. Their sixth child, Franz Wolfgang, was born at the very nadir of Mozart’s fortune. He survived—perhaps, as I wrote, because the family was now so destitute that his mother was forced to feed him herself. 

After Leopold Mozart, a demanding correspondent, died, the picture of the Mozart’s family life becomes less clear. The other reason we know less is because Constanze, like other wives of famous men,* destroyed many letters written by her to Mozart and most of the letters he wrote to her when she was at the spa or times when he was touring. Those that survive are filled with names that she carefully blacked out during the long years that remained to her after Mozart’s death.

Was she protecting her own reputation? Or was she protecting the reputations of people who were then still alive—and still powerful? Was she covering up something? A few bits of gossip remain.

 “Mozart,” it was said, loved his wife tenderly, although he was sometimes unfaithful to her. His fancies had such a hold over him that he could not resist them.”*

While Mozart was probably no Don Giovanni, he was a profoundly talented man working in a profession full of beautiful, talented women. These artists shone the glory of his creation back upon him—a most seductive mirror. Or, perhaps, as has been suggested: “Mozart disguised his own hyper sensitivity by expressing himself through women.”*

The end of the story, culminating in the mystery of Mozart’s death, was created from hints in a multitude of diaries and letters. In the end, I was forced to trust the characters to tell me what had taken place. Whether it is fact or fiction, I allowed the last few chapters of The Intimate Mozart to unfold exactly as my characters explained. 

We women know how much we bring to the table and yet how little we are still regarded. I began by wanting to write a novel which would center on a great man. I ended by depicting an 18th Century wife's world, complete with all the challenges, the successes and failures, the light and joy as well as the sorrows and shadows.

~~Juliet Waldron

*Mozart, by Marcia Davenport, 
*The Mozart Family Letters, translated by Emily Anderson
*Jean-Baptiste-Antione Suard in his Anecdotes of Mozart, 1804
*Martha Washington and Elizabeth Hamilton are known to have destroyed letters "too personal"
* The Mozart Brothers, Swedish film, 1986

The Antics of Anthony

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Here comes Anthony again--because like a new baby in days of yore--this kitty takes up much of our time and attention here at the Waldron domicile. I think the first thing out of my mouth every morning is either "No! Stop That!" or "Get out there!" or just plain "OUCH," when he ducks under the covers and bites my toes, which in his hallucinatory kitten's world, must appear as tasty little sausages. Tony's not "bad," not any more than a toddler or a puppy, just filled with what the 18th Century called "Animal Spirits" or maybe what the stock market types call "irrational exuberance."

How calm and sweet he looks!

Whatever you call it, our Anthony's got it in spades--boundless energy, curiosity and Cat-itude. We've had a lot of cats over the last 50+ years, but this one, I have to say, is unique. Of course, you can counter that with Colette's "There are no ordinary cats," but this boy definitely has star quality.
Too bad I've got no one here to video his Surya-Bonaly-type back flips, his in-air-twists and seven foot leaps onto shelves no kitty should be able to reach, or we'd have a new internet sensation.
(If you don't remember this incredible athlete, check her out here.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UdVcEZZ6so




We get a daily work-out because he keeps Kitty Mom & Dad on their toes--and/or leaping out of their seats to grab what has just been bowled out of the way when Rocket Cat dashes across a window ledge or a table or the kitchen counter. Glasses of coke, water, house plants, framed pictures, Mom's stacks of paper or books--go over in the twinkling of an eye--dash, splash, crash--when "Ant-Knee" from Long Island is on a rip.

Tony says, "I sits where I wants, when I wants."

One morning, when particularly wound up, he ran upstairs after me, rushed into the bathroom and leapt straight onto the window sill which held a pair of forty year old cactuses. I think he was back out the door again in a single rebounding leap, even before the pots hit the floor, dumping the old fellows and their gravelly soil all over the floor in a giant prickly mess. Sometimes, when those "animal spirits" are high, he'll fling himself from the floor onto the walls and scrabble along as if he's a motorcyclist doing a circus "wall of death" stunt.


He wants to taste everything we are eating, and, as you can see, from his place on the counter where we are assembling our lunch, this is pretty easy. He loves cheese and has even assayed my curried kidney beans on brown rice with broccoli. (In end, it wasn't a favorite.) Tony much prefers swiping meat off the counter when Chris is attempting to get it into the sauté pan. Smacking cats doesn't work particularly well, although with him it seems to have a temporary effect in getting him to go away, it doesn't take him long to forgive us and return to whatever naughty thing he was doing.
The only cure is imprisonment in an upstairs "suite" where he has a bed, a box and plenty of munchies and water.

All bowls, pots, and pans are subject to footy inspection

A few days back, he launched himself from the top of the fridge onto the counter, scattering plates and dishes filled with food. This did not please his hoo-mans at all, and I carried him upstairs to the "slammer" while he gnawed on my arm and (alternately) my pigtail to let me know how cross with me he was. After all, his magnificent six foot leap should have garnered applause; moreover, he hadn't even begun his tasting tour of our lunch!

Willy-Yum and Tony (sort of) share a spot on the cat rack;

Still, Tony can purr, kiss, and cuddle with the best of 'em. We've never had so much creative mischief and charm bundled up into a single hyper active fur friend. Tony's a feline trip we're glad we've taken.
😺😺😺✌✌✌

~~Juliet Waldron
See all my historical novels @
https://www.julietwaldron.com

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