Devil Cats

Levi met his first cat. She's the resident feline at Chow Hound and minutes before they came face to face she'd been hiding behind a bin of pig ears that my baby brother had his face buried in up to his schnauzer eyebrows. When she peeked around the corner of the box and mellowed a greeting, Levi fell back on his haunches and cocked his head back and forth like one of those plastic robot dogs. He wasn't afraid. He wasn't inclined to run. He was a fool. Cats are devils with sinister whiskers and evil eyes.

The first time I met a cat I was about the same age as Levi but I weighed ten pounds to his twenty. At the time I still had the nickname of Parrot, rightfully earned because I had a habit of crawling up shirts to sit on shoulders where the view of the world was better. My humans had taken me over to the neighbor's house and there in the corner of the living room giving me an evil stare was what I thought was a lion. They called her a chinchilla golden Himalayan Persian. But I don't care what they called that hoity-toity cat with piercing green eyes, to this day I still think it was a lion. She was huge and she out weighed me by a hundred pounds.

That lion stalked me around the couch. She stalked me into the next room and around the dining room table. She stalked me like a gazelle she wanted for dinner. She stalked me until I had no where else to run. And what did my Mom do about it? Nothing! She just sat in the middle of the living room floor talking and paying no attention to the fact that my life was in serious danger.

Finally, I'd had enough. I ran up Mom's back to her shoulder and from there I crawled even higher to balance on the top of her head like a circus elephant on a pedestal. At last I had everyone's attention but did they help me as the devil cat sat staring up at me? No! They all laughed and I mean seriously as in-pee-their-pants laughed at me. Forever and day later the lion's tamer got her back in her cage and I was taken home where I had a nervous breakdown in private. To this day, they still talk about my hair-raising experience as "the day they wished they'd had video camera."

For the rest of my life I gave cats a wide birth, never seeing one I wanted to meet up close and personal. Levi is going to be different. He's going to have to learn the hard way to stay away from those devil-eyed monsters, at least the yellow ones that look just like the lions on Animal Planet.

Or maybe he's going to learn how to hunt and kill those devils. Already he tracks the neighborhood cat's scent across our back yard and when he finds her droppings, he tosses them in the air like a trophy-toy reward for his efforts. Heaven help that boy if she ever finds him first. Oh, wait! That would be me as Levi's guardian angel that has to help him. Gosh, I'd better go get some advice on how to handle that, should it happen. That where-no-angel-fears-to-go rule has a major flaw in my case. ©

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