My cat will probably need therapy

posted Sun, 08 May 2005

How on earth did O’Malley ever survive life with us without all the necessary cat accessories? I went to Petco this afternoon to get a collar, a tag and a brush for Homer/Virgil/Donne/Shakespeare and could hardly find these basics for all the toys, the beds and the climbing contraptions stacked in the racks.

The volunteer at Mewtopia was a masterful saleswoman. She almost had me buying cat toys and a cat bed. Petco has a kit for clipping a cat’s nails. It has a cat brush that costs $29. I’ve never spent that much on a hairbrush for myself.

A cat does need a bowl and a collar and a brush, but it does not need a bed. It does not need toys. A cat can sleep on a concrete (cement? I can never keep the two straight) floor. A cat will play with anything. I would like Newton/Einstein/Fibonacci to play with and then kill any insects or rodents he finds in my house. A cat will climb anything, including, from the evidence I saw this morning (broken trinket I had on the window sill), the kitchen windows.

But Lydia, the volunteer, was just doing her job. Those cat rescue people are doing this work out of love. Most of them are OK. They are all sincere. Very sincere. Some of them are a little too sincere – as in bordering on didactic. The lady at House of Mews – the one who turned me down because I was going to let the cat go outside spent five minutes lecturing this poor guy – who just wanted to go feed a stray cat – on the difference between “stray” and “feral.”