When I look up from brushing my teeth, there is a cat watching me. I know what she wants. She wants breakfast. For dependant animals, house cats can be exasperatingly domineering. I glance over at my wife, who is still in bed. It’s her day off. I head for the kitchen with the cat at my heels. At the sound of my approach, the other two house cats appear out of nowhere to await their food. The porch cat, who is supposed to stay outside but, with the cold weather, has taken to coming in through the cat door as soon as I’ve gone to bed at night and then,when I get up in the morning, slithers out. I begin the process of dishing out everyone’s breakfast, hoping that they’ll deign to eat what I give them. A full shelf of Styrofoam cat plates is stacked near the shelves of cat food. Half the pantry holds cans of cat food. Invariably, checking out at the market, the cashier will say: “My, you must have a lot of cats.” Sometimes I manage to beat her to it and say: “I hope the economy improves soon; I’m getting tired of eating this stuff.” My wife smiles on the outside but cringes on the inside when I say things like this. She’s afraid the listener might actually believe me.
All the house cats have their special places to eat their food. They like private dining with no distractions. So I put the food for Fancy Pants atop the dryer; she jumps up gratefully. Sweetie eats her food under my wife’s desk and Bart gets his in the master bathroom.
George the porch cat gets his last. I’ve learned that if I wait to see whether or not the other cats will eat what I dish out, George will happily eat something that one of the others walks away from in disgust. Bandito, the barn cat, is also not too proud to take on a plate in similar circumstances; he doesn’t know the difference and I’m not about to tell him.
As the husband of a cat woman, I suffer these responsibilities in relative silence. She is dedicated and takes her relationship with the cats she cares for as seriously as her relationship with me. At least I can feed myself. I am not one of those guys whose mind goes blank when he enters a kitchen. But it is this very fact, that I have opposable thumbs, that places me in this unique position vis-à-vis the cats, at least at those times when I am filling in for their main benefactress. It is important that I remember, however, that just because I’m giving them their food doesn’t mean they have to eat it. Cats have to maintain a certain feline arrogance, and I’ve come to understand that.
My wife provides for more than just the various house cats in our midst. She also feeds ferals. Halfway down our long country driveway, she has created a feeding station that provides sustenance for untold numbers of neighborhood strays. My own opinion is that we are also feeding all the neighbor’s cats, but my wife pooh-poohs this as an example of my usual overly paranoid attitude. I suspect she believes that the neighbors can’t be trusted to feed their own cats, but that’s another story. Anyway, she will fill this feeding station with cat food once a day as she heads out toward “the canyon” where she has been feeding a number of feral cats for years. They live in and around a wooded area a couple miles north of town. My wife is their sole source of food, not counting any small rodents they might manage to catch. Neither rain nor snow nor dark of winter night will stay this cat woman from her appointed responsibility toward these cats. Sometimes she has to shovel her way in after a heavy snowfall. But the cats eat.
Of course, there is a downside to all this. She worries about her cats. If one fails to show up for a feeding over several days, she frets. Her car suffers too. One day she was unable to shift into reverse because so many cat crunchies had inadvertently fallen into the gear box between the front seats. But these are nothing more than the normal travails of any cat woman. As a person who cares for cats professionally at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, she plugs ahead, cat carriers thrown into the rear of her car, traps stacked by the shed for the times each month when she catches cats to be spayed/ neutered. I envy this single-minded dedication.
I’ll keep dishing out food for the cats when the task falls to me. And since cats have relatively short life spans, she asked me to create a cemetery for the dear departed, which I have done. We call it Puss’n’Boot Hill.