Trick or Treat

I don’t care how old my kids get, I still love Halloween. It’s the only holiday that is just for fun, and the expectations are always met. No gifts to buy, no giant meal to make and then overeat. You don’t have to get together with your extended family and justify the choices you made in life.  If you drink too much, that’s on you and not your overbearing mother and emotionally distant father. Just costumes and candy. What’s not to like?

My daughters are in middle and high school now. They don’t wear costumes to school. They don’t have class parties with healthy nut-free treats. One of them isn’t even going trick or treating this year, much to my disappointment. Even though I don’t think fourteen is too old, she does. I decided I would put them in a holiday mood by making them a special Halloween breakfast. Maybe if they started the day with some Halloween fun, it would last throughout the day.

For the majority of their lives, my daughters ate frozen waffles or cold cereal for breakfast. They were never the eggs and bacon types, and who has time for French toast and pancakes on a school day? It turns out that, lately, I do. Now that they can get themselves ready and dressed and put on their own make up and shoes, I find myself with a little free time in the mornings. So between the time I make sure they are awake, which is never, to the time we rush out the door to drive to school, I cook a hot breakfast based on each of their personal preferences. Lately, they have been enjoying a Waffle House experience right here at home. Eggs cooked to order, turkey bacon or sausage, an assortment of fresh berries or other organic fruit to garnish the plate. Seriously, it’s getting all kinds of nuts around here.

I decided to go with pancakes this morning. I saw a sweet little idea on Pinterest for pancake spider webs, and thought, hell, that looks easy. It’s not like I am making pancake portraiture like that stay at home dad/engineer who is making all the talk show rounds. Just a little pancake batter X and some lines to make web spokes. No big deal.

No big deal if you have a squirt bottle. If you don’t, like me, well, there is no way you are making an X or spokes or anything other than blobs. I tried a small ladle, but no matter how thin I poured the batter, those pancakes looked like a mess of fat sticks. Instead of spider webs, my children had 2D rats’ nest pancakes. They cooked unevenly, and even the addition of pumpkin pie spice for flavor was not able to overcompensate for the poor visual presentation.

My daughters went with politeness this morning, begging off any extra pancakes because they were sooo full. Which meant I had a half a batch of batter and no takers. I decided to switch designs and continued cooking. This time, I went with a sort of free form ghost shape, like a lopsided ghost from Pac Man.

Again, my design did not meet my expectations. The heads of the ghosts ended up wider than the bodies, except for the base of the ghost, which was sort of broad and almost bumpy.  In short, the ghosts looked like penises.  Pretty scary, I’d say, but not in the way I intended.

The teen noticed right away, and refused to eat any. The tween, who is as wholesome as Laura Ingalls, had no idea they might be anything other than the ghosts I claimed, but was too full of failed cobwebs to have one.

My husband drifted into the kitchen around this point.

“Hey honey, wants some pancakes?” I said sweetly. The teen choked on her disgusting green machine juice she has every morning. I don't know how she drinks that cup of algae. What is wrong with a good old American glass of OJ?

“Nah,” he said. “I’ll just have oatmeal, like I do every day.” I am sure he didn't mean for that to sound like a hardship, but then again, he did not yet have a cup of coffee.

“Come on, they're fresh, and I hate for them to go to waste.”

He agreed to vary his morning routine. I set a plate full of pancake cocks in front of him and asked one of the girls to pass him the syrup. I almost said something, but from somewhere, a filter surfaced and kept my mouth shut. My teen gave me the look, the look that a mother is supposed to give, no the other way around. My husband, oblivious to the unspoken conversation that took place in front of him, ate up happily.

After I cleaned up, I went upstairs to find my phone and texted the teen. “I just served your father a plate of dicks.” She replied, “OMG.” She also refused to take any pictures for me.

I certainly hope the mummy hot dogs turn out better tonight.

Take No Crap

My husband and I have been having a heated debate about the merits of getting a dog. We are not fast decision makers, so the debate has been both active and spirited for months now, and we seem no closer to a resolution. On one side is my husband. Let’s call that the pro-puppy side. He loathes the cats and hamster that currently reside with us and feels the time has come for a real pet, the kind that hops in the car with you, eager to join you no matter the destination. He has visions of a dog with a bandana around its neck, running along the hiking trail ahead of him or perhaps chasing a ball into the breaking waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

I am on the other side. I don’t want to call it the anti-puppy side, because seriously, who is anti-puppy? I am more against the part where I am the one who will have to do the majority of the bad stuff that goes along with having a puppy. After all, I am not the one working outside of the home. I do most of the domestic responsibilities, and I try not to complain too much about it, certainly not any more than any other person would complain about his or her job. I just know that I don’t want to take on the brunt of the puppy maintenance.

When I look at a puppy, I look beyond the seemingly smiling face and floppy tails and too big paws, to what a puppy really is, a fur shedding energetic vehicle of destruction. Puppies don’t know how to shit and piss in the yard or while walking because they haven’t been trained yet, and someone is going to have to do the training, now, aren’t they? Even then, puppies, like young children, are going to have accidents, most likely on the Turkish rug. Who’s going to clean that up? Yep, the one who doesn’t work outside the home.

You know how babies put everything in their mouths? Puppies do it too, but they are even worse than babies because they are much more mobile. “The dog ate my homework” exists as an excuse because dogs actually eat homework. Some dogs even eat the home. I have a friend whose dog ate the couch when they went out for the day. A couch. Who eats a couch? After a couch is eaten, it will need to be digested and passed as fecal matter, most likely on the Turkish rug. Do you see the pattern here?

Then there are the vet appointments. The person who doesn’t work outside the home will have to schedule these visits and then take the puppy. What if the puppy gets car sick? What if the puppy who goes on to eat the couch has worms? Do you know what happens when a dog is dewormed? Those worms have to go somewhere, and generally it is two exits, not waiting. This will either happen in the car on the way home, or more likely, on the Turkish rug.

Or just maybe, the puppy won’t be able to go at all. Another one of my friends is the grandmother to an adorable yellow lab. Her daughter, who is off at college and thus is the best candidate to make a ten to twelve year commitment to another life, got the puppy. She picked it out because it was adorable, in the face. She neglected somehow to check it out from all angles, having fallen in love at first sight. She brought the pup home, and immediately it began getting sick all over the house.

My friend took her daughter and grand puppy to the vet’s office, where they discovered the terrible truth about their perfect little puppy. Upon examination, the vet discovered that the puppy didn’t have an asshole. Without being able to take a proper crap, the dog was getting sicker and sicker. I don’t know all the details about how this particular issue was resolved, but my understanding is that an anal orifice was somehow MacGyvered and the dog is now able to have a proper bowel movement. However, because of the tenuous nature of the aperture, a human must wipe the dog after every dump to ensure infection doesn’t develop. The puppy is growing normally and has a lot of love to give. It just can’t take care of its own asshole.

I relayed this story to my husband as part of my debate. He countered with my obsession with animal assholes. He’s right; I have a thing about dog buttholes. I don’t like to look at them. I prefer a breed with a low hanging tail, or at the least, a fur color similar to that of the asshole. Some dogs, like German Shepherds, have an upright tail and underneath, a sort of tan fur patch with a dark asshole in the center, a third eye if you will. I don’t want to look at that all the time. According to my husband, the first thing I would inspect on a new puppy is the butthole, making sure it met my strict pet asshole specifications, which means that I would never select an asshole-less puppy. I have to agree, he has a point about that.

Let’s go back to a moment to the two cats and the hamster. The hamster lives in a cage, where it also shits. I don’t have to go looking for a smell or clean a stain on the carpet. It chews, but I can throw a little twig in the bottom of the cage, so my shoes and furniture are safe. I can hold it, and when I am through, I can put it back in the cage with the shit and the sticks. The two cats were both kittens when we got them. Have you ever trained a kitten to use a litter box? It’s pretty easy. You put the kitten in the litter box. It hops out. You put it back in. It digs around a little, then it might pee or poop, and, if you are lucky, it will bury it under more litter. Repeat that a few times, like two or three, and presto, the kitten is litter trained.

 I just don’t believe that puppies are going to be that easy. Not only do you have to train them to poop when taking a walk, you have to train them to walk. And until that happens, if it ever does, there is going to be a whole lot of piss and shit in the house, probably on the Turkish rug. Ain’t nobody got time for that, especially not the two who go to school or the one who goes to work in an office.

It’s not that I am anti-puppy.  I love puppies. It’s that I am anti-shit. I don’t want to pick it up, still warm, with my plastic bag covered hand. I don’t want to scour the yard for smelly landmines before my friend’s kids play back there. And I sure don’t want to spend the next year or so scrubbing stains out of the carpet (or the Turkish rug.) I have a feeling I will be spending more time doing that than I will romping on the beach or hiking on a mountain with man’s best friend. For now, I am perfectly content with the animals I already have. I am used to their style of waste management. I can tolerate it. I rarely have to inspect assholes or wipe them, and even more rarely do I find the occasional misplaced turd, which is downright tiny compared to the massive human sized dumps of the larger dog breeds.

So for now, the debate goes on, unresolved, until I get some sort of reassurance or, better yet, a written contract expressing the rest of the family members’ commitment to feces removal and general puppy maintenance. I do enough of the crap around here. I really don’t any more actual crap. Especially not on my Turkish rug.

Just Say No

Do you remember that after school special starring HelenHunt, the one where she takes angel dust and jumps through a plate glass window at the high school? Well, I accidentally did the same thing to my cat.

Yoko is my nine year old kitty, a sort of almost long haired black cat with one stubborn white spot under her chin, which makes her seem less evil. She is smart in a creepy sort of way.  She is the one who taught herself to pee in the toilet by watching the humans in the house. She knows how to open several different door knobs. I’m convinced if she had thumbs, she would have already figured out how to murder us all and drive my car to Mexico.

One thing about Yoko that really worries me, other than the part where I shouldn’t trust her motives, is that she is underweight. She began losing weight about four years ago, but over the past year she has leveled out to a delicate almost eight pounds. For a few years, we, meaning the vet and I, were concerned that something was wrong with her. Not so concerned that we put her through expensive and ultimately unnecessary tests, but concerned enough that she had to go to regular weigh-in appointments like a newborn baby.  Now her weight is stable, if just below normal, and we are opting to continue with a wait and see approach. No one relishes the idea of doing bloodwork on a cat that makes doing bloodwork on humans her life’s calling.

It isn’t that she doesn’t eat. It’s that she doesn’t eat much. She is always first at the food bowl, but just nibbles daintily on a few little morsels, leaving the rest for my other cat, the one with the appetite of a starving goat, to swoop in and shove the rest in face like it’s the last meal he will ever eat. By the time she decides she is hungry again, she is left with a bowl of little bits of premasticated food that dropped out of the other cat’s mouth. It’s the cat equivalent of back wash, and I don’t blame her for not wanting to partake in that for snack.

I started buying her a variety of wet foods, hoping that would stimulate her appetite. I know it’s not as healthy as the dry kind, but seriously, Yoko is a bit of a bitch. I don’t know if I can handle her having a prolonged old age, it’s it a tradeoff I am willing to make. I decided to feed her the wet food when the pig cat was sleeping so she would be able to finish a meal undisturbed. Unfortunately, she has proven herself to be as finicky about wet food as she is about people.  Even the one brand she has agreed to sample will remain untouched depending on her mood, sitting on its paper towel, waiting for the constantly hungry cat to wake up and discover its aroma.

Yoko spends a good portion of every day standing in the kitchen near the paper towel holder, waiting for someone to come along and rip off a sheet. That is her cue to start caterwauling, as she believes that with every paper towel comes the promise of that precious wet food. I now have to sneak paper towels because of the constant screaming of food she won’t even eat.

I came up with what I thought was a great idea. One thing Yoko does like to eat is catnip. When I sprinkle dried catnip on the rug, she does exactly what she is supposed to do; she rolls around in it and licks it and her eyes get all dilated and she seems pretty relaxed, although maybe not exactly chill. I thought, hmm, what better way to stimulate her appetite than to sprinkle some of her catnip directly in the food bowl? She would smell is heady scent and then gorge herself before slinking away to somewhere secluded to sleep it off.

I’ll be the first to admit I was wrong. Yes, she loved the food. She buried her face in that bowl like she was going downtown. I don’t know if she ate more because I didn’t stick around to see how she responded. Instead, I went to my bathroom to get ready for the day. I was in there putting on my makeup when my older daughter, E, started screaming.

“Mom! Mooommmm!”

I generally ignore the first few bellows of Mom. If I rush right in, how will they ever learn to solve their own problems? I continued to apply my mascara.

“Moommm! Help! Mom! Yoko!”

Ok, now I had a clue. Yoko was probably threatening E in a menacing manner. Or more likely, E was annoying the shit out of Yoko, and Yoko was ready to retaliate. I dug around in my makeup bin for my lip gloss.

“Mom! Oh my god, Mom!” and there was a blood curdling scream, followed by a horrible thud.

I assumed E had fallen down the stairs and ran from my bathroom to find out what happened.  I found E at the top of the stairs, sobbing hysterically, her back sliding down the wall, until she sort of crumpled into a pile on the floor.

“What is going on? Are you ok?” I was genuinely concerned. I looked at her face and arms for bloody claw marks but didn’t see any.

“It’s Yoko. She fell, oh God, she fell from the bannister. Is she dead?” I could barely understand what she said, since it was all in gasping sobs.

I walked over to the top of the stairs and looked down. No cat.

“I think she is ok,” I said. “Why don’t you try to calm down and I’ll go see if I can find her.”

I ran down the stairs and looked around. No Yoko. She wasn’t in the front room. Not the hall way. Not the kitchen. I finally found her loafing under the dining room table, looking pissed off, like normal. I picked her up and moved all her limbs. As usual, she hated being touched.

I trotted back up the stairs to where E was still sitting on the hallway floor.

“She’s fine. Seriously.  What happened anyway?”

E tried to catch her breath. “It was horrible. I came up the stairs and she jumped right in front of me, on the banister. I thought she was going to attack me. She looked so wild. And I called for you but you didn’t come. And I called you again and that’s when it happened.”

“What happened?”

“She fell. She kind of jumped backwards, and she thought she could hold on. But she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. She clawed at the railing on her way down. It was the most horrible thing I have ever seen. She just fell, right in front of me.  I stared into her eyes as she fell. It’s the worst thing I ever saw, that fear. I thought she died.” E isn’t dramatic at all.

It wasn’t the first time Yoko had jumped atop the bannister, but it was the first time she ever freaked out and fell to the first floor. And I knew why.

“E,” I said. “I think it’s my fault. I kind of put catnip all over her food.”

“Wait, what? You got the cat high? Why would you do that?” She stopped crying.

“I thought it would make her eat more,” I said.

“So you thought if you put catnip all over her bowl, she would have the munchies? Good one, Mom.”

“I didn’t think she would try to fly. I just thought she would eat a little more. I guess I won’t do that again.”

“I guess not, Mom. I guess not.”

All the Rage

What is the world coming to? It’s getting so you can’t even give someone the bird anymore without fearing for your safety.

Yesterday afternoon, my lovely young tween and I were victims of road rage. We were coming home from the monthly allergy shots, and it was mid-afternoon. Rush hour had not yet begun, so there didn’t seem to be any urgency or stress related to the commute, just a typical drive home from the allergist’s office.

I drove home on a three lane road and had one car in front of me, with about a car’s length between us. I passed the Publix on my left when another car pulled out of the grocery store lot into the median next to me. Instead of waiting for the lane to be clear, he just kept coming and squeezed between me and the car in front of me. No turn signal, no warning, just a quick veer into my lane. I had to brake to avoid hitting him and honked my horn, not out of anger, but to let him know I was there.  It was a single short honk, a little more than a friendly tootle, but certainly not a long fuck you honk. I live in South Carolina, not the Northeast US. We don’t generally honk a lot down here unless we have a good reason.

Now, instead of realizing he just almost hit me, he rolled down his window and started waving his arms around in a crazy fashion. I did what any normal person would do in response; I flicked him off.

Let’s review for a minute. I was in my lane. A car without any warning or right of way serves into my lane because god forbid he had to wait his turn to drive. I honked because I thought he was going to hit me. He gestured at me, and then I returned the gesture.

This is where the crazy train leaves the station. He slammed his brakes, hard, so that I had to do the same. Okay, I have seen this dangerously stupid move before, and I will never understand it. Why would you want someone to hit you, especially if you are in such a big fucking hurry that you don’t have time to make sure you have the right of way? I didn’t hit him because I could already tell he was nuts and was keeping a safe distance from him. Unfortunately, he was making me nuts too. So I gave him the double finger, both hands.

He slammed on his brakes again. Then he stopped the car and got out, yelling angrily. What the actual fuck? Who stops a car on a roadway in the middle of the day like that? I locked my car doors. My tween next to me looked up from her cell phone and asked me what the matter was.

Crazy Train stood right next to the driver door screaming at me. I was impressed with how well insulated my car was because I couldn’t hear a word of his. Cars were backing up behind me, but no one honked or did anything. I wonder if anyone realized someone had just lost their shit on a suburban road in front of them.

I cracked my window to hear what he had to say. It was probably not the smartest thing I could have done. The smartest thing would have been to call the police or to write down his license plate or maybe even to start filming him with my phone. In the heat of the moment, however, I didn’t think of any of those. I thought instead of listening to why he was yelling at me.

“What is your problem?? You are supposed to let me in!” he screamed.

I have been driving for years. Years. I don’t remember that rule of the road. I remember the part about the turn signals and making sure the coast was clear, but not the part where if you try to force yourself into a lane, someone is supposed to know what you planned to do, and then to let you do that.

“Have you ever heard of a turn signal?” I yelled back. “You almost hit me!”

“Great example you are setting there for your kid,” he yelled.

I might not be perfect, but flicking someone off in front of my twelve year old hardly seems the sort of thing that deserves criticism from a stranger. I came back with a real zinger. “Great example YOU are setting for my kid!” 

He walked back to his car, and I rolled my window all the way down and yelled, “JACK…ASS!” Take that.

He started his car and instead of driving away, he looked like he was getting ready to do the asinine breaking thing again.  Luckily I was at my neighborhood, so I just put on my blinker and made a right turn.

And scene.

The tween was scared, legitimately. I drove extra slowly to our home just to make sure he didn’t turn into the other neighborhood entrance and follow us. When my own anger wore off, I was pretty scared too.

All I did was honk my horn. I didn’t let him over because I had no way of knowing he was planning on coming over. I didn’t lay on the horn; I didn’t honk it multiple times, and I didn’t do it in anger. I did it to get his attention, the way God intended us to use horns. Instead of getting a sorry wave or nothing, I got some seriously fucked up shit.

Looking back, should I not have honked when he came in my lane without warning? Should I have attempted to swerve around him in the median and risk possibly hitting him with my car when he got out of his car and angrily approached mine? Should I have done nothing? I honestly don’t know what I could have done differently in that instance, other than not rolling down the window and yelling back.

Now, when it came to the giving the bird, sure, that I could have left off. That man could have had a gun. He could have blown my brains out all over my daughter in the seat next to me. I didn’t think about that, I just thought he was a total dick, and I lifted my middle finger to let him know.

Let’s be safe out there, folks. And if you think about, try to be nice too.

The Love Canal Disaster

You know how you hear a story that is so wonderfully funny you want to share it, even if it would cause someone else terrible embarrassment? If it happened to you, you probably would only tell a few privileged individuals, really close friends, maybe, people who share your sense of humor and don’t judge.   This is one of those stories. It involves things you might not want to read about, like periods and tampons. Also, you have no idea who this story involves. Don’t jump to conclusions. You don’t know who it is about, so just shut up.  Names and details have been altered to protect the innocent and the mortified.  Stop it, because you don’t know who it is. Ok, kids, here we go…

Tampons are pretty routine for the long time user, but for a young girl who is new to them, they can be rather tricky. Some girls act like they are no big deal, but a great many  teenage girls balk at the mere idea of a tampon, the idea of sticking something inside their you-know-what, in order to absorb the worst thing that ever happened to them, that happens every month for like ever, well, it just can’t get any worse. The mere mention of a tampon sends fear to their very core, or possibly their vaginas, and that creates a big problem. Why? Because in order to use a vagina properly, it must be relaxed. A tense vagina is just not very forgiving.  You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?

What happens when a vagina is too tense to accept the reality of a tampon? If it’s the initial stage, then that tampon just isn’t going to go in. Then you must resort to plan B, a pad, and everyone moves on with their lives until the next trip to the bathroom or, if not soon enough, the inevitable ruined pair of shorts and ensuing humiliation.

But here’s another scenario. What if you got the tampon in, but later, it doesn’t want to come back out? What if it’s in there like Punxsutawney Phil, scared of its own shadow or the light of day? How do you get it out?

It’s not unheard of. When I was in college, a girl in my dorm forgot she had a tampon in and inserted a new one. The two of them somehow knitted themselves together, and she had to go to the health center to get them extracted. Naturally, we all talked about her because that’s what girls do. I never understood how she didn’t know she already had one locked and loaded, but she could have been drunk or stupid or something.

Sometimes you just plain can’t get it out.  It isn’t that unusual, especially at the end of one’s cycle, to have a bit of dryness in the old cooch. If your flow isn’t heavy enough to saturate the tampon, it gets, well, stuck, too dry to be budged. After yanking on the string of a dryish tampon for a while, the vagina starts to have a panic attack, and bingo, the perfect storm, or drought, since we are talking about dryness here.

I heard this story about a teenage girl who couldn’t get her tampon out. She struggled with it for a good thirty minutes, but it wouldn’t move. She panicked, and that vagina went on lockdown. The girl did what she had to do. She texted her mother.

Her mother came to her aid. On the other side of the bathroom door, to ask how she could be of assistance. The girl explained that her tampon was stuck and that she didn’t know what to do. The mother offered a few suggestions. Relax, she said. Take a few deep breaths. The girl replied that she was beyond that and she needed real help, not new age meditative bullshit propaganda. The mother suggested that she open her legs wide in an effort to maybe help the vagina stretch and yawn and maybe spit the tampon out. The girl began to cry, convinced that she was not just going to remove the tampon, but that the uterus would come out as well. The mother asked to enter the bathroom, but the girl screamed for her to go away.

The mother, who was not fond of being yelled at, went into her room, and soon after, was joined by the girl. She had tears in her eyes, desperate for help. The mother thought and thought. She suggested the girl try a lubricant of some sort, perhaps the well-known brand KY Jelly. The girl stated she didn’t have such a product. The mother thought she had given the teen some when she began using the dreaded tampons, but she was, according to her daughter, mistaken. The mother told the girl she had some personal lubricant the girl could borrow.

This is where the story gets interesting. The mother realized that if she went to retrieve the personal lubricant, the girl would discover where she kept the product. This was a detail the mother did not want the daughter to know. She asked that the girl return to her bathroom and wait for the mother to return with the lubricant.

The daughter left the room, and the mother went to the father’s nightstand, where the personal lubricant was kept. Alas, when the mother removed the bottle, she discovered that the container was almost completely empty. She knew she couldn’t hand the empty lubricant bottle to her child. The day had been traumatizing enough as it was.

The mother devised a plan and joined her daughter in the bathroom. She instructed her child to close her eyes and hold out her hand, so that the mother could dispatch some of the lubricant into the girl’s outstretched palm. The child closed her eyes and opened her hand. The mother began to vigorously shake the lubricant bottle up and down, squeezing it over her child’s open palm. Nothing happened. The mother repeated the steps, up and down, squeeze.

Are you thinking of an empty ketchup bottle right now, one with just one glob of ketchup left at the very bottom? Good, you should.

Finally, with a loud wet noise, the bottle released the last dollop of personal lubricant into the teen’s open palm. The child was visibly disturbed by both the texture and the sound of the lubricant, and asked the mother what she was supposed to do with it. The mother instructed her to slather it around the opening of the vagina and perhaps a little inside if possible, and then to relax and open her legs wide and if everything went according to plan, the vagina would release its hold and allow the tampon to pass.

The daughter instructed the mother to leave the restroom at once, and to close the door behind her. The mother waited for about twenty minutes, but the daughter never left the bathroom. The mother texted the daughter to ask if it had worked, but alas, it did not. After more time had passed, the daughter had decided to take a shower, and the heat and the water were able to accomplish what the mother’s lubricant could not. They both decided to never discuss it again.

You should do what that mother and child resolved to do. Never discuss it again. Just be glad it wasn’t you.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Once a year, I do the unthinkable. I take my cats to the vet.  It’s worse than it sounds.  I don’t have two carriers, so I don’t take them at the same time. Honestly, I don’t think any of us could handle it. They hardly like each other, they can’t stand the car, and they flat out hate the vet. I, on the other hand, adore my vet. He really tries to do his job, as much as the cats fight him, and there is nothing you can’t talk about with him.  And I do mean nothing.

I took Yoko first. She is the alpha cat, and the old lady of the house. At nine years old, she is so waifishly thin that she has surpassed maintaining her girlish figure and gone straight to frail. Yoko hates to get in the cat carrier, so I let her ride in my lap on the way there. I am sure we make for an interesting sight, just a woman tootling down the street in her Volvo SUV with a very angry and thin long haired black cat in her lap. Ain’t nothing dangerous about that at all.

She did fine until the vet walked in the exam room, which is when she turned into the cat from “Pet Cemetery,” all scary hunched and flat ears, fangs exposed and loud hissing. The good news is her teeth were exceptionally clean. She also gained a half a pound. He attempted to finish the exam with Yoko under a towel, but she managed to turn her head three hundred and sixty degrees before biting him. Good thing he had on oven mitts. The bad news is that when she lashed out, she got me right between the thumb and pointer finger. I was the only casualty.

After I got her home, it was time to take the other one. Moshe is younger and much more timid than Yoko. He is twice her size, a good fifteen pounds to her eight. He is also sweet and gentle, but dumb as a sack of hammers. He is the only living creature that I love despite his extreme stupidity. In fact, I love that he is an idiot. On him, it’s endearing, those big vacant eyes just staring at nothing.

Moshe was also scared of the car ride, but not because he remembered where we were going, more because he doesn’t understand what a car is. We got checked in and went back to the exam room. After Yoko’s exam, where I was the only one who got scratched, I decided to leave him in the carrier until the vet entered the room. Moshe stared at me from his carrier, meowing loudly. I, unfortunately, don’t understand meows, although I did get the tone of what he was saying.

The vet came in and checked his cat vitals, weighing him and combing through his fur and looking at his anus and whatnot. He asked me if I had any concerns, and I did. I told him that Moshe has taken to licking his genitals very frequently. I was worried he might be developing cystitis, although the litter box seemed pretty normal as did his eating and drinking.

Cystitis is not unusual in male indoor cats. When I was a kid, we had a cat that developed such severe cystitis that he required surgery. My childhood memory of the event involved the vet doing some major surgery, turning his penis into a cat vagina, or maybe just removing his penis and leaving him totally without male genitalia. I remember it with humor, because when we first got him, we thought he was a girl kitten until he/she had to get fixed, which was when we found out about the whole penis thing. And then, a few years later, no more penis.  I had a transgender cat before transgender cats were a thing.

Are transgender cats a thing?

Also, that operation had to cost a pretty penny. Looking back, I cannot believe my mother would spend any money on the care of a cat. Hell, we went through cats like they were paper plates. And she was tight with money unless she was spending it on herself, so there is no way she coughed up that kind of money to fix a very expendable cat. I have a theory. I think she slept with the vet for surgical favors.

But I digress. I told the vet I was worried about the cat’s constant junk licking. He got the veterinary technician to hold Moshe still, and then got down to table level to try to examine my cat’s penis. Moshe was appalled. He tried to resist this violation of his privacy, but he was no match for the woman holding him still and the veterinarian exposing him. All the while, the vet tried to speak calmly to him. “I know, Mosh, it’s your penis. No one should be licking your penis but you. I get it.”

I was speechless.

After he finished his exam, the vet stood up and said, “We are going to have an uncomfortable conversation now.”

“I thought we already were having one,” I said.

He ignored that and continued. “You might not know this, but some animals masturbate.”

I did know this. My mother in law’s dog used to rub one out with an old Mukluk slipper every chance she got. That damn poodle would slipper scoot across the room for hours. It was the only time she seemed happy. I can’t say I blame her.

He went on. “If a cat licks his penis frequently, we first have to make sure he doesn’t have an infection. You said the litter is normal, and upon examination, his penis looks normal too.”

He stopped talking for a moment and took out a pen and a piece of paper. He began drawing a cat penis for me.

“So a healthy cat penis would look like this, kind of like, well, it comes to a point, you see, sort of pointy. Like a cone, an ice cream cone.”

“No wonder he licks it all the time,” I said. No, I didn’t. I said it in my head.

“If you get really close to it, you will see it has these barbs. That’s perfectly normal for a cat penis.”

“I am not planning on looking closely enough to see barbs. I don’t want to look at it at all,” I said.

“So if it were inflamed or irritated, it would be rounder on the top, like a mushroom.” He drew another cat penis, this time with an inflamed tip. I wanted to knock the pen out of his hand.  “It doesn’t look inflamed though, so that’s a good sign. Which means, well, that he licks his penis because he likes to lick it. If you look on Google for, wait, let me say it differently.”

I laughed, out loud. I actually LOL’ed.

“Don’t go to Google. If you look at the Cornell website, you will see information about animal masturbation. It’s normal for some animals. Just make sure he doesn’t overdo it or it will become irritated. If it gets all swollen, or you know, bulbous on the end. Short of that, though, well, I guess he can have at it.”

Moshe and I were both embarrassed by that visit to the vet, and if you count Yoko too, we all were traumatized. It’s a good thing we only have to go once a year.

In Memoriam

I don’t feel right posting something funny on this solemn day, as if laughing on 9/11 makes a person unpatriotic. For many people, it is a day of reflection, of sadness, of introspection. Our nation suffered a horrible tragedy on this day thirteen years ago. Some people lost their lives, some people lost their loved ones, and the rest of us lost our sense of safety.

The truth is, most of us did feel safe up to that day. We had not had much in the way of large scale loss of human life, and certainly not on our own soil. Sure, we kill each other or ourselves on a daily basis, but we consider those small, individual tragedies, not one that affects the nation’s collective conscience. Over three thousand people died on 9/11, not just counting the Twin Towers. According to the US Census, over 6,000 Americans die every day.  There are also over 12,000 American babies born every day, so we still come out ahead, don’t we?

I feel less safe now than I did thirteen years ago.  Not because of the terrorists from lands far away. I feel less safe because of my fellow Americans.  I don’t want to go to a store and see people walking around with guns. I don’t want to be scared to honk my horn at another car to get their attention. I don’t want to worry about my daughters going to school.  One of those I don’t worry about every day, but I bet you can’t tell which one it is.

My daughters wished each other a happy 9/11 Day this morning. One of them was a toddler thirteen years ago, the other in utero. It’s meaningless to them, really.  They don’t know what the United States used to be like, before 9/11. These are the same kids who say Happy Memorial Day, Happy MLK Day, Happy Veterans Day.  If they ever remember Pearl Harbor Day, I am sure they would wish me a happy one of those as well. I wonder if in a hundred years, 9/11 will be a day off, the mourning and reflection replaced with a tasty cookout and an awesome sale at whatever replaces Best Buy.

Was I scared after 9//11, my daughters asked me? I told them yes and no. I wasn’t scared for my personal safety. I live in South Carolina. It doesn’t strike me as the biggest or most effective target of terrorism. I didn’t know anyone who died that day. I cannot imagine what it was like to be in New York City, in Washington, D.C., in Pennsylvania, on that day and for months after.  I am moved by the stories of others, as most of us are, but as far as a personal connection to that day, no, I am lucky I don’t have one.

What I was scared of, and continue to be, is how easily we gave up personal freedoms in the name of security for the country. We all lost our privacy that day, and we continue to give it up with very little protest. We gave up common sense, and a sense of community and trust and compassion. We gave up our belief in difference of opinion. We gave up mutual respect.

Does today make me sad? Yes, but not just for the loss of those two twin towers, for the people whose lives were taken from them. I am sad for myself, for my fellow Americans, and for my children. I am sad for what this country has become, for what we once were.  And I am sad because as a nation, I don’t think we have really learned anything from the tragedy thirteen years ago.

I hope today is a day of reflection, of telling those that matter to you that you love them. Life is fleeting, but so is freedom.