I’m sitting up here on my lookout perch near mama’s desk drooling over the birds she feeds in the morning, sort of a TV set for me really because I’m not into hunting much but I loving watching those birdbrains and imagining tearing their throats out. I can’t go out until they’ve stuff their little gullets, but I chatter away ominously just to let mama think I’m considering a stalk when I get out there.
And now I’m climbing up on mama’s chair now to nuzzle her for my breakfast. I hope it’s turkey again because I’m really on a tear now after last Thanksgiving and am so svelte and skinny that I just slink along just like those ritzy model-type kitties with their pedigrees and rhinestone collars (idiocy, if you ask me; one of mama’s and papa’s friends was here recently and she had read some book about how dogs hate those silly clothes their owners put on them and how they just put up with it for the owners’ sake, and I can say owner about doggies because they are owned (and no cat worth it’s purr is ever, ever going to be owned by anyone).
Sometimes I hear mama talking about how her friends in that other place across the pond might be a little miffed at her and papa for pulling up stakes and leaving to have a whole new life in another country with some of papa’s family and speaking totally different lingos from whatever they speak in that other place, but if they hadn’t done that and put down roots in France and built that house I found one day, then where would I be, I ask you? Slinking around this little town, hoping for a handout most likely, but I wouldn’t be getting baccala al forno or poached salmon every now and then.
Frankly, I wish I could tell mama and papa where I came from but I’m not sure I remember that well. All I know is that I was homeless and cold and hungry, but someone must have fed me before and kept me pretty well because all I had when I found my place in life was a few ear mites and a problem with sexual matters; that is, I had been ‘fixed’ (there has to be another word for that; I sound like a clock or a broken radio or a cracked plate or something) but it had not really fixed matters the way it should have been and so I had to be …hmmmm….repaired? Adjusted? Neutered? Sterilised? Echhhhh.
And there I was and healed up just fine and didn’t have to wear that ridiculous spay suit that vet woman sent home with mama, the one that sent her into hysterics.
No frou-frou around here. As they say in Rome, where I sometimes reside, as you know, my mama and papa parlano come mangiano (I’m not sure of the grammar here but it means, they speak as they eat, which means no frou-frou, no beating around the bush, no bullshit, they just talk the way they munch, straight to the point) and so I am spared those cutsy-pootsy little cat clothes that people dress their kitties in and then take pictures of them and put them on the internet. Can you believe it? If I saw myself in one of those outfits on the net for everyone to giggle over I would use up one of my nine lives, I promise you that.
