This is a sad post about a cat.
My wife’s friends—well, my friends, too—brought a cat back from Macedonia where they served in the Peace Corps for a few years after college. They named their cat The Colonel. They found him as a kitten, stranded on a highway in Skopje. He was a surly street cat that would eat out of the trash and he had all kinds of fun parasites, just like Colonel Sanders.
I’m pretty sure he’s the kind of cat that eventually sleeps on a baby’s face.
A few years ago, we went to visit Adam and Danielle and The Colonel in Colorado. I stayed home alone while Tracie and Danielle ran an errand and Adam was at work. My memory is a little fuzzy, but I think it had something to do my not being able to poop from traveler’s constipation then taking a bunch of laxative and being afraid to leave the house, so I wasn’t in the best mood to begin with.
Let me also add that I’m really, really, really allergic to cats, so I’m not what you’d call “A Cat Person”, but on this trip, I made an honest effort to get along with this cat. I would pet him, and play with him, and be really careful not to touch my face unless I first vigorously washed my hands, but eventually, inevitably, he would do something shitty, like scratch me or go dump out a bunch of trash, or attack their other fat cat, Princess Charles.
So after a disappointing 20 or 30 minutes of not pooping, I came out of the bathroom to find that The Colonel had made a big fucking mess. He’d gotten into the trash and dumped it out all over the kitchen floor, as I was warned he often did. I started yelling at him, “You little shithead! What the fuck is wrong with you, you stupid cat! Who does this?” Because he’d been doing shit like that all week, and really there’s only so much a man can take, especially when he’s constipated.
Then Tracie and Danielle came home and saw me freaking out, yelling at the cat, and suddenly I remembered a great line from a horrible movie:
When you yell at a dog, his tail will go between his legs and cover his genitals, his ears will go down. A dog is very easy to break, but cats make you work for their affection. They don’t sell out the way dogs do.
And I realized, maybe I’m the asshole.
Well, I just found out The Colonel has liver cancer. Tomorrow he’ll be put down, and this makes me very sad. In hindsight, he was worthy foe. The world won’t be quite the same without him. I’m sorry I couldn’t earn your affection, Colonel, but you earned my respect. Here’s to you.
We weren’t running an errand, we were all still asleep and woke up to you cursing out a cat.
P.S. The picture I took of Chris after he finally pooped made it into our wedding slideshow.
