We had a houseguest over the summer, #3’s hamster, Luigi (who’s a girl — leave it to me to play host to a rodent with sexual identity issues). Have to say, everyone grew quite attached to the little critter, even if she did sleep fifteen of the sixteen hours when we were awake. Even so, one of the highlights of that shared hour of consciousness was watching the cats scatter as she zoomed around the downstairs in her roly ball. Which, yeah, is a really sad commentary on our lives, but there you are.
In any case, she went back to live in her own house last night — a brand new, three story cage with everything but a hot tub, to hear tell of it. I actually miss her, although not nearly as much as the cats, whose dreams of hamster pate are now dashed. The boy cat — a big red tom whose walk, from the back, is eerily reminiscent of John Wayne’s — even got on my lap this morning while I was watching Katie and Matt. And purred. Guess he hoped if he sucked up enough I’d bring back lunch.
Or at least that I’d let him back outside. Having lost way too many cats from letting them out, we determined that these two would be inside cats. Period, end of discussion, no exceptions. Except they both kept begging and begging, so we reached a compromise: They could go out for short periods, but only if one of us went with them. Kind of a supervised playground time. Which worked really well for a while — I’d take the laptop out and write, they’d sniff around the plants, roll in the dirt, munch grass, chase butterflies and eventually flop down underneath my chair and snooze. Life was good. And if I went back inside, they’d hotfoot it in right behind me, because, you know, something big and bad was sure to get ‘em if they stayed out.
One evening, however, Boy Cat didn’t come in right away. So I left the back door cracked, figuring he’d come toodling back eventually, and went about starting dinner. A few minutes later, I look over to find him standing there with wings protruding from either side of this face and an “Oh, crap” look on his face.
Since I write stories with happy endings, I’m pleased to say dove (yes, dove) was rescued and as far as we know is peacefully living out her dovey little life somewhere. Boy Cat, however, was quite distraught at having his first Big Catch taken from him (although I do wonder where he thought he was going to stash the thing?) and remained pissed with me for days.
And now the hamster’s gone. It’s enough to drive a cat into therapy.
