Mother of Ten Buys Farm

My cat is neurotic. Out of control. She begins stomping in my hair and squealing at 5:00 a.m. now. She has not only adjusted to Daylight Savings Time, she has reinvented morning. She races from pillar to post rattling wires, batting around hard objects like hockey pucks and knocking things off surfaces in a specific order that never varies, like the Stations of the Cross.

Truffle suffers from a depression mentality. She believes that at any moment, the world's supply of canned cat food will run out and she will be found on the kitchen floor, feet in the air like a dead bird. When I go for my shoes, she goes for her bowl, looking over her shoulder fervently to make sure that I'm following. She would prefer to go for my jugular if she could reach it. She knows in the darkest recesses of her little kitty soul that I will never return. Every time I leave the apartment is the Very Last Time. I will not pass this way again, and her cupboard will be bare for all eternity. St. Truffle of the Perpetually Empty Bowl. She does not care for chow. "Try it, you'll like it," I tell her. "Chow is the new chicken." She sneers at me like a fluffy Elvis and knocks a new can of meat from the stack. I know she hates me because I have thumbs. She gets four or five feedings a day which must be microwaved to the perfect temperature, the one that approximates fresh kill. Even newborn human babies get four designated feedings a day: 10:00, 2:00, 6:00 and 10:00 again. This is the schedule imposed by hospitals. Anything else and you're on your own.

It makes no difference if Truffle has just eaten. When we sit down to a meal, she streaks to her bowl and directs her most imploring look at me, the one that brings to mind all those starving children in Europe I had to eat for when I was a child. I never grasped the logic in that, how my eating could possibly help them, but I passionately wished that my parents would take all that liver and cauliflower and send it to them. From this behavior, I infer that Truffle's fixation on food is as much psychological as physical. Her sense of propriety dictates that we eat together. Even if she bursts, hair and teeth everywhere.

She went to college with my daughter. Starred in several episodes of Pussies Gone Wild. Ten babies later, her kittenhood spent, she was given to Grandma to raise. We took away her "toys" and she fills the emptiness with canned flesh as often as possible, which provides endless opportunities for yakking in secret places, difficult to reach. If all the chickens that have died for this cat were stretched beak to tail feathers, they would reach Uranus. I think the medical term for her condition is Nutjob. Earlier posts about Truffle are here, here, and here.