Regarding My Two Cats

First, I must digress and say that half the men I encounter claim an allergy to cats. Of course, for some this may be true, for others, I expect is psychosomatic.

For myself, I don’t have any particular affinity to animals in the house, whether cats or dogs, but I do find cats a lot more tolerable. They’re clean, they can be left alone for days at a time (mine are outdoor cats so they just take walks around the neighborhood and have wet dreams about catching birds…), and their physical grace is a marvel of nature. Dogs, on the other hand, require constant attention, often in the form of French kisses, which is something I prefer to reserve for my relations with attractive human males… They also need babysitting, get sad when left alone, and needed to be walked with a poop scooper on hand. That’s a lot more than I’m willing to do for anyone but a real child, and even then, I know that at some point the child will grow up, dogs never do…

So as you probably understand, I do have cats. Two cats that we adopted when we moved into our house, as pets for my kids. My daughter in particular wanted them, although for some reason I’m the only person in the house that seems to remember, on a consistent basis, to feed them…

I’m slowly getting to my point…

When we adopted the cats, there was the one that my kids wanted – slender, long legged, shiny black fur, genteel in every way, and afraid of her own skin. We called her Laila (night in Hebrew). And there was the one that I wanted. A smaller, athletic, slightly cross-eyed white and black cat that kept harassing her adjacent cage mates in a kinda, “come on, let’s play” type of way. We named her Criss Cross, for her eyes, and affectionately we call her Crissy.

For the first few years of their lives, Crissy ruled the roost. Harassing Laila. Visiting all our neighbors to collect choice selections of food (much better than the dry cat food I laid out for her), while Laila stuck religiously to the boundaries of our yard, and bounded away when anyone came near.

How things change… Today Laila rules the roost. She slowly realized that her long legs and superior strength count for something, and today, when new food is presented, Laila makes Crissy wait will she’s eaten her fill. Chrissy, who in her youth was never home, always visiting around and generating midnight phone calls from remote neighbors that had found her and thought she couldn’t get home by herself (she could), is now a homebody. All she wants to do is rest, sleep, and come over to nudge her nose into my breast (dreaming probably of her mom…).

A friend of mine recently described Crissy as a housewife… That was a shock. In my mind she’s still the tomboy, but maybe not…

Is there some analogy that can be drawn here? The fearless tomboy that grows into a sedentary housewife, and the neurotic, clumsy, long legged beauty that grows into Miss powerful career woman? I don’t know. But it’s tempting…