So all y’all who’ve been around a while already know this, but I have a cat, and she is a spoiled princess named Chita Rivera after the Broadway legend because of an inside joke circa 2007. (It’s not that obscure an inside joke. My dude worked for the local altnewsweekly, and Chita Rivera was coming to our city, and the guy who ran Gaywatch [the gay community calendar] was SO EXCITED that he had a 52-week countdown to her visit, and also had a mural of her painted on his dining room wall, which the legend herself did indeed politely admire when she visited, just to lay any suspense to rest. Anyway we got a kitten during the last 20 weeks of that countdown sometime, and since she sang and danced, we figured we might as well give our Only Cat an over-elaborate people name. And also it was a fitting homage to a woman who really is a legend after all.)
Anyhoo. She is a Good Cat, generally, very chatty and snuggly but not a furniture-destroyer or a revenge-pee-er or a scratcher or anything. She’s not big on playing with cat toys but she does have one weakness:
She loves socks. My socks specifically. Only when they’re balled together; singly, she could care, but if I have them balled up then they’re perfect for wrestling with and carrying around.
I’ve been having a rough end-of-winter, so the other night when I was collecting laundry off the drying rack in the guest bedroom I did myself a tiny little favor, and instead of collecting the socks and putting them into a pile in my room like I do (near the drawer they ought to go into, in the time-honored fashion of my people), I just set them in a little heap on the floor by the rack.
And sure enough, every time I look there’s another pair of socks somewhere strange in the house. I mean, I know I’m only enabling her to make a mess, but it is making me laugh a lot to keep finding random balls of socks in strange places in the house.
(She won’t touch them if anyone’s looking. If she remembers you’re in eyeshot she’ll drop them and walk away with elaborate nonchalance. But sometimes she just forgets you’re there, and she’ll go over and start fighting with a pair of socks. It’s the best thing.)
