A Week in the Life of Scooter the Cat
A week of mayhem, destruction, and really wet paws
Scooter is young and full of energy. Although I do occasionally find him curled up on a pillow, he spends much of his time engaging in shenanigans. This week, his shenanigans have caused a bit of mayhem and destruction.
Last Tuesday, my sister was visiting from Illinois. She was hot, so I put a small fan on the table beside her chair. The table in question is a tall, gold, Victorian table. I suspect it’s not actually from the Victorian era — I suspect it’s from the 1920s, when Victorian replicas were all the rage. Even so, that still makes it a 100-year-old table. It had a mirrored top. Note the past tense in that sentence.
I put the fan on the table, and we played a board game. Somewhere in the middle of the game, Scooter jumped from the window to the fan — not a particularly long jump for a cat. And Scooter isn’t a large cat. But he hit the fan just right, with the right amount of force — the mirror shattered. The fan fell through. Scooter froze, bracing himself on the broken table top.
I scooped him up and checked him for injury. He was unscathed. The fan was also all right. I picked up the broken mirror (that’s seven years of bad luck for Scooter) and threw it away.
My sister went home on Wednesday morning, and I went to work. When I got home, I fed the cats — only two of them were missing. Scooter and Fat Zombie were not in the kitchen.
I called for them and checked the guest room, where they like to hang out. Scooter is always with Fat Zombie. It’s not friendship — it’s more like stalking. They stalk each other and fight, but they’re always together. It’s some kind of weird obsession.
They weren’t in the guest room. Puzzled, I stepped back out into the hallway — and noticed the bathroom door was closed. I opened it and there they were, closed up in a small space together. Towels and a nightgown were strewn on the floor.
I imagine they stalked each other to the bathroom, fought, and one of them rolled against the door, shutting it. Each of them probably blamed the other one for their predicament. Who knows how many hours they spent in there together.
Yesterday morning, Scooter fell in the bathtub as it was draining. There was about two inches of water left. He fell in with a splash and froze, puzzled. The expression on his face was pure confusion. He lifted a soggy paw, decided he didn’t like whatever this was, and climbed out of the tub. He stood on the ledge for a moment to try to regain his dignity.
Someday Scooter will be old and lazy. He’ll stop getting himself into predicaments — and I’ll miss the days when I had lots of Scooter stories to tell.
