Kitty Care

They tell me it’s good for oldsters to get themselves into unfamiliar situations.  Finding your way in a strange town without a GPS is a suggested exercise.  That works for me because I don’t have a GPS, and if I did, my aging brain cells would get a workout getting the gadget to operate.  I suppose the ordeal awaits me because paper maps seem to be going the way of phone booths. I’m pretty good with maps, at least until it’s time to fold them back up.

Today, my cerebral calisthenics involved going to Petsmart to buy supplies for my mother’s cat, Peaches.  Mother has taken up residence at the LIfecare Center on Obery Street, but the cat still resides in Mother’s eight room house.  I have a neighbor helping with the feeding, but I do some of it myself, and I’m the quartermaster. 

The cat was low on food and cat litter, which are pretty much all the provisions he requires.  I have a different philosophy from my mother’s when it comes to cat feeding.  I am of the opinion that a hungry animal will eat whatever food is provided, and if the creature rejects it, he simply isn’t hungry enough.  This philosophy works with soldiers in the field and small children in the home. Eskimo kids eat raw seal blubber, or at least they did before their culture was corrupted by Pop Tarts and Ring Dings. 

Not everyone agrees.  I once knew a woman who went to the fish market for fresh fish which she boiled up for her cat because the chubby gourmet wouldn’t eat anything else.  Of course he didn’t.  If were a cat faced with the choice between fresh fish cooked daily to my taste and canned garbage from Mrs. Paul’s fish stick factory, I’d go on a hunger strike too. 

The pet food industry caught on to this phenomenon. Supermarket shelves are lined with tins of gourmet treats with pictures on the labels make the contents look appetizing enough to serve your most discriminating human guests. Some cat owners, like the fish cooking lady, fear their animals will die of starvation if their palates aren’t tempted, and others believe, if they pamper their cats, the little dears will love them.  Personally, I believe that the cats lap up the expensive canned goods and chuckle at their owners’ stupidity.

If the cat were mine, he’d think he was in boot camp, but Mother is making a difficult adjustment to the routine at Life Care, so she needs to know that Peaches is getting the loving attention he has been used to from kittenhood.

Shopping for him put a strain on my aging brain cells.  Of the hundreds of small cans that line the shelves of the Petsmart catfood aisles (Yes they have more than one.) I finally chose a brand that offered single serving containers in boxes so I wouldn’t have to juggle them. 

Then I moved on to the kitty litter department. This was really perplexing, but there was a bevy of cat owners there who were willing to instruct a beginner.  I had heard from my helper that she doesn’t like the clumping kind, but everyone there insisted that clumping kitty litter is a scientific breakthrough that has revolutionized cat ownership.  A gentleman recommended a brand he said was the best he ever used.  I liked it because it wasn’t heavily advertised, and I reasoned that it might be making it on excellence instead of hype.  The word clumping wasn’t blazoned in big letters, but by the time I’d lugged the heavy container to the checkout counter, I had read the fine print and found out the product could clump with the best of them.

 I toted it back and began again. The cat lovers resumed their praises of clumping cat food, and I was getting tired.  There didn’t seem to be many brands that didn’t clump, although Petsmart is such a vast emporium, there may have been a separate non-clumping kitty litter section that I didn’t find. I took home some Arm & Hammer because I remembered the baking soda from my Grandmother’s day. 

Expertise is yet to be achieved, but at least I’m stocked up.  In the past, Peaches has both scratched and bitten me, mainly because I have been the one to apply his anti-flea treatment, which he doesn’t like.  I would hold him firmly while Annette would place a dab of the insect repellant on the back of his neck where he couldn’t lick it off.  Mother didn’t’ like to trouble her pet and let his enmity fall upon me. Now that he sees me as the provider of his Fancy Feast, his attitude has changed, and when I enter the house he purrs and rubs against my legs.  I’m less than impressed.