I’m envious of my cat’s dreadlocks
Old cats retire from grooming. It is part of the Cat Contract, which is all about minimizing effort. Just a few months ago, while attempting to pet him, I made the discovery that my cat no longer included grooming in his top ten list of activities (the first nine slots being reserved for eating.)
Mookie is roughly 14 years old. His lush black “bunny fur,” once enviably soft to the touch, used to elicit oooohs and ahhhhs from guests (moments before he bit them.) Now that silky fur forms clumps. And those clumps multiply like tribbles.
System can’t handle the hairballs any more, he must have thought, and then just…stopped. Not even some token licking of the paw and swirling it prettily over the ear.
I’m embarrassed to have a post-grooming cat. Did I fail to set a good example? What sort of “pet parent” does this make me?
Mind you, I am dutiful. I stepped up. So now, in addition to feeding my cat and “scooping” his litterbox, I have become an amateur cat groomer to an irritable, obese longhair. My skills are mediocre at best, but the goal is this: to slowly eradicate those dreads, and prevent new ones from forming.
Mookie resembles a small black parade float. He has always possessed a flair for drama and outrage. At a sudden noise — such as the shocking, unprecedented event of a chair being pushed back from the kitchen table —he startles like an actor in a silent movie.
Needless to say, grooming Mookie is no walk in the park. There are two different brushes, one for his two predominant moods: “don’t touch me” and “get the hell away from me.” Each morning I make a mental note to search Amazon for Kevlar gloves, then wonder if it might land me on some sort of terrorist watch list.
The first step is Distraction. I pour food into his bowl. While he inhales it like he’s in a nightclub restroom, I have a few seconds to perform the next step, Manual Inspection, and select the Clump Du Jour. Then a few more seconds for Eradication, when I attempt to untangle the clump with the brush and pull it free. The dreads are no longer attached to him, they’re just hanging on to some willing hair that is. A Clump a Day is All We Ask.
I admit there is something satisfying to removing cat dreads — in an OCD sort of way. I always show it to Mookie and ask him to reflect on whether his retirement from grooming is “worth it.”
Compounding the frustration I feel at this new, unpaid job is my seething envy. Just like Mookie, I’m at the age where I yearn to retire from grooming. I don’t suffer from hairballs (yet) but I do suffer from frequent hair coloring and cheap pedicures, which have all the allure of a trip to the doctor after fifty-five. While many women consider this “me time” or “pampering,” for me it’s the equivalent of going to the carwash — you don’t want someone writing “exfoliate me” in the dead skin on the back of your arm.
I’m still waiting for Crone Chic to become a Thing. I mean real, retired-from-grooming Crone Chic. Yes, I’ve seen the quasi-inspirational photo essays about seniors who rock eccentric haute couture (at a lower price point it’s called Being a Bag Lady.) This is far too much work and I can’t imagine why any self-respecting Crone would bother. Seriously, if we have Normcore and Momcore, why can’t we have Cronecore? (I can just imagine Kristen Stewart asking her colorist for grey roots.)
As more Boomer Pets retire from grooming, maybe someone will step in to fill this need. The Gig Economy would probably explode were affordable, on-demand mobile cat dreadlock removal to become widely accepted in our society. I’m sure the Europeans are already all over this.
Until then, it’s time to find a really flattering pair of Kevlar grooming gloves.
