My wife’s mom passed away recently and we inherited some new furniture. A two-piece sectional sofa for the family room, two easy chairs for the living room and an antique mahogany table for the dining room.
And now the Cat World, and my Gary’s World, will never be the same.
Newman walked in the door, took one aghast look at the new Sofa Monster and disappeared instantly in a puff of black smoke. Actually, the smoke might have been black cat hair.
I knew where to find him and went to look in his litter box so I could calm him down and talk to him about it. He always hides in his covered litter box when something terrifies him. Only he wasn’t hiding in his litter box!
An hour later I finally found Newman’s new hiding place. He was squeezed onto the top shelf of the floor-to-ceiling bookcase in my office, under a book called “I Just Got a Kitten. What Do I Do?” by Mordecai Siegal.
That’s pretty amazing! I didn’t think a 19-pound longhaired Maine coon cat could squeeze into anything.
And how had he managed to climb to the top of a floor-to-ceiling bookcase?
My other cat, Tut, is a little more blase about these things, even though he absolutely hates changes of any kind. Cats want things to stay the same forever.
It took Tut only two days before he worked up his nerve to jump up on the new sofa. He immediately claimed the pillow in exactly the same spot as his old favorite pillow on the last couch. In Tut’s Cat World, that’s known as the Power Pillow. When Newman finally settles down, if he ever does, he’ll pick his own Power Pillow, and death to any cat that dares to touch one of their personal pillows.
If that ever happens I will breathe a big sigh of relief because it will mean that my Gary’s World will have returned to its own normal weird and wacky self.
Epilogue: So I’m sitting on the new sofa watching World Cup Soccer reruns last night when out of nowhere (cats love to do that), here comes Newman. I hear the thud-thud-thud of his hoof prints thundering toward me across the hardwood floor, and feel the sudden bump as his head plows into my leg (“Love ya, Dad!”).
Suddenly Newman lands in my lap, squishing all the air out of my body, and his huge black face, 6-inch white wire whiskers and enormous bright yellow eyes are mashed nose-to-nose into my face. All of his 19 pounds are stretched out across my lap and chest and not a single centimeter of his body — not one single black hair — is touching the new Sofa Monster.
