I thought my cat was dying this week. I have two cats. One has been diagnosed with multiple health issues but appears to have been thriving lately due, I suspect, to the fact that he doesn’t understand about the kidneys. He only understands about the extra cuddles he’s received for being sick.
He’s not the one I thought was dying, though. My other cat, Callie, was. She has nothing that I know of wrong with her other than the fact that she is somewhere around or beyond 15 years old. I don’t know how old that is in human years, but it’s at least as old as I am, and that in itself is something to be concerned about.
Anyway, Callie was just curled up doing nothing all of the time. She wasn’t getting up to ask for anything to eat. She wasn’t getting up to demand attention of any sort. She was just sitting there in a ball of calico.
I decided to try to entice her to eat with a little Fancy Feast. She’s been on a diet lately just like me.
So I mixed some Fancy Feast in with some Science Diet and picked her up and took her to it. She started eating. I was proud. But then she came over and started yelling at me, and I realized she had picked out all of the Fancy Feast and was ready for a refill. I don’t know how she did it. This was canned food all mushed up together, but she picked out the Fancy Feast and left the Science Diet in the bowl.
Now she is cured. She is back up doing her usual stuff…with one additional activity. She follows me around the house yelling at me.
I’ve decided that she wasn’t sick before. She was depressed. She thought she lived in a world in which Fancy Feast was no longer possible. Now that she knows it is possible, and I’ve been deliberately holding back on her, she is one angry cat.
I sympathize. I’ve been holding out on myself too. This is also a house without Ben & Jerry’s.
Tomorrow, I’ll eat my arugula without much complaint. I might miss the old ways, but I have come to terms with the reasons for the new ways.
I have no such hope that the Science Diet will be consumed without complaint. I can’t say I blame her. Sometimes a little treat to make the world seem like a better place to live is more necessity than treat.
That said, I ate a few peanuts for my treat, and that’s about it. I carry little snack packs of nuts in my purse, and when I pull one out I hear in my head the line from Eudora Welty’s story “The Petrified Man”: “Honey, them goobers has been in my purse a week if they’s been in it a day.”
You’d think that thought would keep me out of the goobers, but we take our treats where we can get them around here.
