Cats

    My parents have little appreciation for cartoons. My kids and I, however, enjoy them. My mother tells me her father called all cartoons Cats. “That’s just Cats, he’d say.”
    “Why?” I ask.
    “You know, because of the old Tom and Jerry, and Sylvester and Tweety Bird.”
    “Oh, I adore Tweety Bird,” I say.
   Recently we were looking for something appropriate on television for our five-year-old granddaughter Frankie. We clicked on Tom and Jerry.
    I know some people may complain those old cartoons are too violent. But, within moments, Frankie was laughing so hard we let her rip through the entire series over the next few days. When it ended, she said, “Let’s go back to the first one.”
    So, we did.
    I loved my grandfather, Pa, but I have to challenge his taste in some matters. Not, of course, in whom he chose to love—myself, in particular. Has anyone else ever loved me quite so unconditionally?
    I’ve always loved dogs, as well as cats. My most recent pets have been cats, largely because they are easier to tend if you travel a lot. Over the years, my husband and I have had three cats. They were all gray rescues, but each was unique in temperament. Each was special.
    Buster was the most loving around humans, though she could be mean to our other cat, who was growing old.
    “That’s totally natural,” my husband, a veterinarian, said.
    When Buster died, we did not get another cat. We were travelling more by then. “It’s really not fair to them,” my husband said. “We have to leave them so often.”
    As different as they were in temperament, one thing they had in common. They all hated to travel.
    My son-in-law loves cats too, so he, my daughter, and their two kids adopted a pair. Honey and Sunny do not like me, which both surprised and saddened me, especially now that our cats have passed. This does not prevent me from enjoying their antics.
     I suppose cats are like people. Not everyone is going to love us, even in our own families. This should not keep us from loving them.
    As a writer, I realize not everyone will appreciate my books. That should not prevent me, or anyone so inclined, from continuing to write and seek an audience for their work.
     I also love theater, including musicals, and I enjoy the poems of T. S. Eliot. So, I was astonished when I saw Cats in New York and failed to appreciate it. I admire Andrew Lloyd Weber’s body of work, and Memory is one of my favorite songs of all time. Still, it did not suffice to sustain me through over two hours of cavorting humans pretending to be cats. Perhaps I was jet lagged. I remember being tired.
    In one of my novels (Scorned, unpublished as yet), I resorted to having my least likable character kick a cat. I’ve always considered rescuing a kitten or kicking a cat a cheap device to make the reader like or dislike a character. But, at the time, it felt like something he would do. Actually, he felt so real to me I believed he did kick that cat in a moment of frustration.
    Later, when he cheated on his wife and she left him, I felt little or no sympathy for the man. After all, he’s also a cat kicker.