W. Bruce Cameron

Feb 18, 20100

My Relationship With Cats

I didn’t have any felines growing up, though I did have gerbils, hamsters and other small rodents — I guess my parents decided that though I couldn’t have a cat, I could have things that cats eat.

Our neighbor, Mrs. Reid, was a widow who owned four cats, which my father said was evidence she wasn’t interested in ever getting married again. My friend Billy had a cat, too, one that Billy claimed he had trained to hunt rattlesnakes. We spent a lot of time searching for rattlesnakes to bring home to his cat, so maybe it’s also accurate to say that Billy trained us.

I never spent any time with Mrs. Reid’s felines, but I did try to rescue Billy’s cat from a tree, where it had climbed to have a better view of all the snakes in the area. Billy was 8 years old and I was 10, so I couldn’t ask him to climb up there — this was a man’s job.

For some reason I’m remembering that the cat’s name was Brenda and that Billy’s sister’s name was Fluffy. I’m not sure why we concluded that Brenda couldn’t get herself out of the tree without assistance from a boy, but I was eager to give it a go because it had not escaped my attention that Billy’s sister Fluffy did not have a boyfriend. I was pretty sure that once I saved her cat, I would be a shoo-in for the empty-boyfriend slot, though what I thought might happen after that wasn’t clear.

Brenda didn’t look very distressed up there in the treetops until she spotted me unsteadily making my way toward her. She’d probably never seen an actual hero before. She became more and more alarmed the closer she came to being rescued, her eyes growing large and her fur puffing out in a way that made her whole body look, well, fluffy.

“I gotcha,” I told her, which was the first lie I ever told a cat. I barely had myself, up there where the branches were thin and weak. I reached up and pulled Brenda off her tree limb, and she came away like Velcro, her claws fully extended.

I don’t know what I expected to happen at that point, being unsure as to how cats exhibit gratitude. What did happen was that Brenda twisted, jumped and dug her claws into my T-shirt.

Underneath my T-shirt I was wearing my skin. Brenda’s talons raked deep furrows in my chest as she scrabbled for purchase. I tried to get her to calm down but was hampered by all my screaming.

“Don’t drop her!” Billy yelled, which goes on the list of Really Dumb Advice I’ve Been Given in My Life. You can’t “drop” something that has impaled you. I was trying to push Brenda away from me, and Brenda, it seemed, was digging for kidneys.

Eventually we reached an unspoken compromise: Brenda would leap gracefully away from me and dance lightly from limb to limb until she was on the ground, and I would hang in the tree and bleed.

“You could have killed her!” Billy accused angrily.

No, Billy, but when I get on the ground I’m going to kill you.

It turns out that climbing down out of a tree is more difficult than climbing up, especially when your skin is shredded. I became concerned with falling, and having already experienced my quota of pain for the day, decided I’d rather cling miserably to thin tree limbs and weave in the wind than drop heavily out of the sky — because as I considered the height from which I would plummet and all the branches I’d hit on the way down, I knew there was almost no way I could be assured of landing on Billy.

Billy’s father had to fetch a ladder to save me, with Fluffy standing there watching contemptuously. The boyfriend position eventually went to a big kid named, I think, Bluto.

And, from that point on, when people ask me how I feel about cats, my answer is simple. It’s not that I don’t like cats, it’s that cats don’t like me.

To write Bruce Cameron, visit his Website at http://www.wbrucecameron.com. To find out more about Bruce Cameron and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at http://www.creators.com.

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