Kick the Cat

"Kick the Cat" is not an expression one hears very often. If you Google it, you will come up with an eclectic mix of things, including the following joke:

There's this kid who lives on a farm. He comes home from school, in a really bad mood. He sees a pig and kicks it. Then he sees a chicken and kicks that. Then he walks into the house.

"I saw you kick those animals", his mother said, "For kicking the pig, you'll have no bacon for a week. For kicking the chicken, you'll haveno eggs for a week."

The kid's about to say something, when his father walks in the door, also in a foul mood, and kicks the cat. The kid says to his mother, "You want to tell him, or should I?"

The origins of the phrase are unclear, but it does seem to have crept into the dark corners of our lexicon, to be dredged up when nothing else will do. The other day I uttered to no one in particular, "Well, I guess I'll go home and kick the cat and take a nap," and, even as I said it, I didn't know where it came from.

The fact is that when I arrive home, my cat, Scarface (He arrived with that name, but that's another story.), invariably greets me at the door with a meow that translates roughly into, "Where have you been all day?" And, rather than kicking him, I lean down and give him a little scratch behind the ears and mutter something like, "Hi buddy, have a good day?" Whereapon he scrambles away with an energy release that has been building throughout his day of lethargy, which he has truly mastered.

I would no more kick Scarface than spit in my own coffee. He is not a perfect, or purr-fect cat. He won't let me pick him up (which makes transporting him to the vet a task I relegate to my more callous brother-in-law, whom I have to thank for the cat's arrival in my home,) and he is a fur factory, which generated a nickname "Pita Cat" (Pain-in-the-ass Cat), which sounds harsh, but is not underserved. He manufactures fur and deposits it in clumps on the floor and in fine coatings on his favorite pieces of furniture, which I would rather he abandon, but which I cannot consistently protect, and on dark pieces of human clothing, particularly polyester. For a time, I collected the accumulation from his occasional brushings in a rapidly growing mass, which I had vague intentions of having spun into yarn and made into a hat, until a new friend was grossed out by the concept as well as the football-sized accumulation. So I deep-sixed it, with mild regret. I don't brush him as often as I should, though he seems to enjoy it. I feel guilty that I have no good reason for this save for my selfishness of time. And I don't think it would help much - a bit like rolling the boulder up hill.

One evening, while enjoying a dinner with the same friend who bestowed the sobriquet "PITA Cat," Scarface sat immobile within sight of the dining table, staring at nothing in particular, and we evenutally tool notice of him. She noted how dignified he looked and suggested that "Scarface" was not an appropriate name. "He looks more like, um,... a Charles." Indeed, he is a pleasant orange-ish pastel with little variation, posseses a leonine profile, and whiskers that, were they to serve as antennae, would pull in the most distant signals from deep space.

So the poor devil has at least three names, depending on the mood of those around him. In reality, he may have more, since he was rescued from an apparently motley collection of felines from the environs of an elderly lady who had to depart from her abode due to ill health, leaving the feline pack unattended. As such, Scarface was strictly an outdoor cat, but today, he has become so accustomed to my home that one has to entice him and wait patiently for him to venture so far as the front stoop. In the several years we have been house mates, I do not believe he has been out of doors more than fifteen minutes, every one of them characterized by a sort of grudging curiosity. "Well, if I must. But only for a moment."

If there is a four-legged creature that requires less maintenance than Scarface, I would be surprised. I make sure there is always food (dry) and water in his dishes and change the kitty litter (to which he is faithful) on Sundays, and brush him when I have nothing better to do. In return, he greets me unfailingly when I return home, puts up with my eclectic taste in music, occasionally leaps unexpectedly onto my lap in those rare moments when it is not occupied by a computer, newspaper or book, and joins me in my naps as a warm arm rest, curled up nicely against my ribs. I am nearly as nocturnal as he, and spend my nights writing or reading from my rocking chair on the enclosed porch, with Scar napping (he is an olympic-quality napper) on one of the forbidden chairs to my right, occasionally rousing himself sufficiently to look my way with an expression that removes any doubt that he has a profound thought to express but finds me unworthy.

Okay, well, that's about enough for tonight. I guess I'll finish up, kick the cat and hit the hay.