GenePool Humor

As I write this we're putting the finishing touches on our annual Christmas tradition of Having No Money To Speak Of, thanks to our spectacular advance planning skills coupled with some very persistent bill collectors that now resort to simply taking the money directly from our accounts before we can say anything about it. It's a special time of year.

This season we added a new tradition: Losing One's Cat. As you may know, due to some poor pet maintenance and a family that is genetically incapable of giving away animals, we currently have five cats in our home. One would think at least one or two could be designated Emergency Spares in the event one gets lost or broken, but that's not how things work here. No, when we lose a cat-- any cat-- all hell breaks loose.

The cat in question is named Moki, and she has been trying to get out of our home for some time now. She happens to be a non-spayed adult female trapped in a house with three fixed adult male cats, two human males who, thanks, aren't interested, and a female kitten. So every few months Moki completely loses her mind. She walks around the house meowing plaintively and waiting for someone to please, please, please mount her. Anyone, really; the dog would do fine. So would a stuffed animal. If we had mice she'd probably catch one just to try and mate with it. As you can imagine, I find this completely hilarious. Except when it's three in the morning and she's loudly attempting to screw my hand. Then? Not so funny.

Moki spent the summer on our back porch announcing free kitty tail to the entire neighborhood, and at one point succeeded in attracting a suitor from next door. She was so excited she actually jumped down to the first floor porch. Because, you know, THAT doesn't look desperate. We managed to catch them before this lothario whipped out the Barry White-- as it were-- which only made life more difficult for Moki, because then she KNEW there was hope.

Anyway, on Friday, Tim had his friend Jonathan over for an afternoon of video games and mindlessly random activity that thankfully did not involve setting things on fire. At some point, the two of them decided that they must obtain larger quantities of sugar than our home had available, and further, that the very best way to obtain said sugar was via bicycle. Mind you, it was about twenty-five degrees and windy at the time, and the store was a mere six blocks away. This is what I mean by mindless.

The bikes are kept in the basement, and one gets them out by way of a side door that has no knob and can only be locked on the inside. Which Timmy never does. The way he sees it, it's much quicker to just leave the door open, because then when he gets back he can put the bike away again without having to go through the house. And, it increases his chances of one day meeting a real live serial killer with a basement fetish, which I guess he's looking forward to.

Now. Our cats love the basement. I don't know why; they just do. All except for Zeke, who is our socially dysfunctional cat. Zeke avoids the bathroom because he once got sealed up in the bathroom wall, and he doesn't go near the basement because he ended up stuck down there for two days once because he was too stupid to meow when we went down to look for him. (He also spends hours trying to get his non-functioning penis to work for Moki so she can shut the hell up, and sniffing the dog's ass for reasons that are unclear to me. But that's another column.)

So Tim and Jonathan ventured into the basement and neglected to close the door with an effective degree of force to prevent a cat from following them. And then they compounded the problem by not locking the outside door.

Many hours later, Tim was in the midst of his bedtime perambulations, which mainly involve finding Baby-- the kitten-- and forcing her to sleep with him. (No, not like that.) He found Baby in the basement. We all went haha, you fool, you and Jonathan should have been more careful, etc. Hours later, my wife realized she hadn't seen Pepper or Moki since she'd gotten home. She went to the basement and discovered Pepper. Then she asked me if I'd seen Moki.

Again, we have five cats. If you have one cat, it's not so hard to think back to a time when you saw said cat. But seeing a particular one in a house with five is just not that memorable an event, even when that one cat is seriously considering fucking your shoe. So I had no answer for her.

We searched the house. We searched the basement. We did not find Moki.

Thus began the Questions I Simply Cannot Answer, such as "Do you think she'll be all right?" and "What do we do if she's trapped somewhere?" I can't answer them because they are unanswerable, so I just repeated the "I'm sure she'll come back on her own" assertion to everything. I truly believed this, and also believed she would come back pregnant. Because this is my life.

Deb didn't sleep all that well that night. She kept getting up every couple of hours to go on the back porch and call the cat. So if you are one of my neighbors and you have been wondering why my wife was standing outside at three A.M. in a bathrobe and meowing loudly, now you know.

And of course we could not spend the next day looking for the cat because we had to go shopping, and there was no way around it; it was the last Saturday before Christmas. Plus we had to spend the money quickly before our creditors learned we had obtained some. They're quick, those creditors.

We also had to go into Boston at 8 for a choir concert, as it appears my daughter joined one at some point, leaving us with a very small window for a thorough yard-by-yard search. Deb and I commenced this search at 6. After dark. Not the best time to catch a seven pound cat.

We walked around in the dark and called our cat's name. Which is stupid, because cats don't come when they're called. Or, they don't come to me. Deb could probably get one to come to her, because she possesses a Snow White gene. Still, I tried. "Moki," I called, "come out; I'm wearing your favorite shoe." (Additional note to my neighbors: this was why I was in your back yard. I appreciate that you chose not to call the cops or try and shoot me.)

No luck. I did successfully stalk another cat, but as he did not share the same fondness for my shoe, our encounter was brief.

We got back an hour later, much colder and still absent one cat and making plans to post fliers, which I was against. Not that I didn't want to get the cat back. I just didn't see the point. Our urgency was partly based on the fact that a storm was coming, so finding Moki before rather than after the storm-- given she'd never been free for any length of time ever-- was important. But it seemed to me the only people who'd see the fliers would be the ones who made it outside before the rain and snow, after sunrise but before nightfall, and on a day that was averaging ten degrees. The only people who fit this description were disturbingly over-dedicated joggers and escaped alzheimer patients, neither of whom were likely to stop for a poster that read "Lost: Not The Brightest Cat In The World" and know what to do about it.

But then we found her. In the goddamn basement. Deb had ventured down there almost hourly for nearly two days and had no luck before Moki finally realized there was no food and water down there and meowed to come back up please.

A missing cat was probably the most memorable event in the run-up to Christmas, but it wasn't the most emotionally damaging, at least not from my standpoint. That came on the previous Wednesday, when I was informed that my daughter will be attending high school next year.

Yes, it's true. I don't know how it happened or why it HAS to happen, but apparently Becky survived long enough to attend high school, and she fully intends to do so by this time next year. Worse, it's apparently against the law for me to stop her.

If you are an adult reader, you perhaps understand why I find this so alarming. In my mind, there is a line, and that line is the last three years of high school. Everything in my life is defined by this line, as BHS-- Before High School-- and AHS. From my viewpoint, BHS was an eternity, while AHS has been very brief, even though this is simply untrue. How can I have a daughter who is about to enter high school when I could swear I just left?

There are other problems. When I think of high school I think of a fairly large number of things I don't want my daughter to do, see, think, drink or smoke in her lifetime. Like naked hot tubbing with a fairly sizable number of the opposite sex. Or sex in general. Yeah, that's going to be a big problem. I may have to lock her in the basement with Moki.

I had a conversation on Thursday with a single mother who was earnestly interested in discovering where Becky would be going to high school, because she had spent the past two years researching, going on tours, filling out forms, and applying for scholarships to get her daughters into private school, something she decided to do after having completed extensive research on Cambridge Rindge and Latin (the only public high school in our city) and come to the conclusion that it just wasn't good enough for her kids. I wanted to stop her and say "wait, you KNEW this high school thing was going to happen? And you didn't TELL me?" Instead I just nodded and tried to mount a defense of my decision, which was pretty pitiful as I had not made any decision per se; it really just sort of jumped me from behind.

Wednesday night was the night I got to bring my nearly-in-high-school-oh-holy-shit daughter to Cambridge Rindge and Latin for an orientation meeting. Every eighth grader in the city was invited, the thing lasted over an hour, and they didn't serve the adults any alcohol whatsoever, which I think was a tactical error. Because I was not the only one there in need of a stiff drink, just based on some of the expressions I saw. Also, if we were hammered we probably would have missed a couple of things. Such as:

--that they felt the need to introduce the director of security to the gathering. His assertion that CRL is "much safer than it used to be" did not fill us with joy and comfort. Neither did the "study" he used to back of this claim, insofar as the study consisted of an informal survey of students, who all agreed that this was "one of the safest high schools in the country." Seems to me the students aren't the best people in the world to ask this particular question to.

--the idea of Blocks. Blocks are blocks of time. The school cycle, starting next year, will consist of four classes a day, five days a week, with each class lasting eighty-two minutes. Not a bad idea if you're taking history or a foreign language or something. Not so hot if you happen to be taking, say, dance. I'd say sometime in the second week the entire dance class will become a tutorial in how to recognize compound fractures and the nature of shin splints.

--this comment, about the aforementioned blocks, from one of the teachers: "we're brainstorming for ways to keep the children interested for a full eighty-two minutes." Yeah, good luck with that.

--the new hot tub they're going to be installing in the gym locker room. Okay, I might have been imagining this one.

Becky, because she is a genuinely enthused student (I don't know how this happened either) is very excited about going to high school. Like our perpetually horny cat, she's anxious to get out into the world on her own, although presumably for slightly different reasons. And, like the cat, she's looking forward to it, and yet has no idea what she's getting into.

When we got out of the meeting and the kids started wandering around a table set up with sign-up sheets to various scholastic clubs-- I think Becky signed every one-- I noticed just about every child there operating with the same level of enthusiasm. While every parent stood back, took a deep breath, and said to themselves, "how did this happen?" I don't know about them, but I'm sure as hell not ready for this.

So that's what I got for Christmas this year: a still not lost cat, and a daughter to remind me I'm getting old much faster than I should be. Both of them are clawing at the door. I think I'll be all right about it eventually. Unless one of them comes home pregnant. Then all bets are off.

© 2004, Gene Doucette

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