Cat Lady

We've all read stories about a "crazy cat lady" - and maybe we even know one. My image is of a single woman, who is just a little bit eccentric (that's the nice way of saying odd), and has a house full of felines. Usually the newspaper story reads something like: "Woman fined - 60 cats living in one bedroom apartment". And if it's not a newspaper headline, it's the neighbors complaining to the city about the lovely aroma wafting from the abode on the corner and their gardens being used as litter boxes.

This evening I experienced a glimpse of that life.

Doc. B. had a yoga workshop tonight. Since I had a Friday night to myself, I decided to run an errand so that I wouldn't have to do it over the weekend. I went over to one of our new shopping centers - the kind that has a huge selection of stores and restaurants that all share the same parking lot. It was a pretty busy night so I had to park the truck a good walk from the pet store - my one and only destination. When I go to the pet store, I like to stock up on everything all at once: cat food, litter, you name it. So I loaded up my cart and made my way to the cashier. As I was unloading the cart, Ms. Clerk said "oh, honey, don't worry about taking it out of the cart - you have so much litter in there, I don't want you to have to lift it any more than you have to". Then she asked me how many cats I had. When I replied "just two", she looked at me and smiled but her facial expression was saying "yeah, right - sure you only have two cats. That's what everyone says no matter how many more they actually have."

And her face was partly right. An old co-worker of mine used to say she had "three and three cats". It was her way of not saying she had six cats.

So I swiped my credit card, scanned my frequent shopper key fob, and pushed my cart back out into the parking lot. I guess the weight of the cart must have been obvious because as I made my way to the truck, I got lots of sympathetic stares. All the cool people who had been spending their evening in Target, Barnes and Noble, or Five Guys Burgers and Fries, seemed to be either amused by my efforts or were feeling sorry for me. And it got even worse as I made trips back and forth from the cart to unload it into the truck. I could just hear their thoughts...

That poor lady has nothing better to do on her Friday night than to stock up for the cats running around in her litter-strewn, urine-stained, un-swiffed, hairball-covered, clawed up house.

Mirror, Mirror on the wall, don't show me this life in your crystal ball!