Tonight, Mandy's friend, Ken, is here and right now, they just left to take Sammy for a late night "business" walk. (One that, hopefully, will keep him from pushing the bathroom door open during the night and going in there and leaving a deposit on the bathroom floor that I would then have to clean up when I wake up and stumble in there, half-awake, ya know!)
When they take him out late at night like this, the simple cat we have -good old Fluff-Nuts -seems to like to stroll along with them too. Mandy says it really is quite comical to watch the cat as he will walk along side of her and Ken a little way and then, kind of drop back a few feet -momentarily -and all of a sudden then, he will spring into action, running up behind Sammy and pouncing on Sam's back or batting at his head or tail -which is almost always in motion too, I might add.
It is really funny to watch these two -Sammy and Fluff-Nuts -as they are still very good friends inside the house. Not simply toleration on Fluff's part, but he walks around, sometimes going up to Sammy and meowing right in his face, other times, he will seek the dog out and snuggle up against him. Kind of nice, seeing these two get along this well ya know.
But anyway, tonight -before they left -Mandy had been telling Ken about some of the many other animals we've had here over the years and in doing so, she happened to remember a story about me that my kids have always thought was really hilarious.
This was back in the mid-to-late 80s and at the time, we had a dog -something we almost always have had -and we also had two cats then too. I don't remember now which cats these were but I do know, we had two cats at the time.
Anyway, one day I was upstairs in my room, trying to clean it -to get rid of some stuff I no longer needed or used or that fit -and in doing cleaning like that, it entailed moving a lot of my furniture out of my room and into one or the other two bedrooms until I got things cleared to my satisfaction.
As I was doing this, at one point, I noticed one of the cats -a gray tiger striped fellow -soundly asleep on my bed. Not that this was an unusual sight because we always seemed to acquire the laziest cats in the area, the kind that usually do nothing outstanding except to sleep.
I may even have stopped momentarily to stroke his fur a bit and talk to him. Who knows.
But only a few minutes after having seen him, as I was moving a dresser into the girls' bedroom, I noticed that cat laying on a little chair the girls used to toss their dirty clothes on to before gathering them and putting them in the hamper. And on seeing him laying there, I got to thinking that this cat must really be fast and good at scampering from one room to another, getting all positioned quickly too and already asleep there without my having even seen him moving at all.
Almost like he had flown between the two rooms, ya know.
But anyway, I got the dresser into the girls' room and went back to my room to start moving something else around and there, in front of me, before my eyes, was the same darned cat, in the same position as before, asleep in the middle of my bed!
What the heck was going on here I asked myself as I turned and went back to the girls' room and saw this cat still asleep on the chair over there.
And then it dawned on me that my kids, knowing if they had said anything to me about bringing another cat into the house that I would immediately have nixed that idea, had gone and smuggled in this cat -one that was absolutely identical to one of the cats we already had too and then, I began to wonder how darned long they had been able to pull the wool over my eyes with this cat deal anyway.
I called older daughter Carrie -who was at work -and grumped to her that her brother and sister had gone and smuggled another damned cat in here -used a few bad words in the process of telling her this and she howled laughing at me.
"Mom, " she said, "that cat has been in our house for at least three weeks now and I can't believe you never realized that before now!"
Well, no -I hadn't noticed an extra cat at all.
After all, when you have kids as good as mine obviously were about sneaking things into the house behind my back and if one of the things brought in looked exactly like the other cat too, how the heck would you know it was a different creature anyway?
Or maybe, just maybe, I really needed to either give my glasses a darned good cleaning or even to get my prescription changed and get new glasses so I'd be better able to see these things!
Just a little humor that Mandy reminded me about tonight and something that over 20 years later, my kids still love to tease me and tell people about "this is how dense Mom can be at times: ya know!
Just one of many things on my "bucket list" of wishes that some day, something akin to this will happen to one of the perpetrators of this deed to me!
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