Sunday and The Boys

It’s a Sunday, with the day dawning clear and calm, a bit chilly, but what I think of as chilly anymore really isn’t when one considers how frigid the rest of the country is. Thinning blood, creaky bones. And for the first time I’m playing Christmas music. Right now I’ve created a Pandora station of holiday music to play on my back-room television. Right now, Mannheim Steamroller is quietly giving me their rendition of “Silent Night.” I guess ten days before the event is about right for the barrage of carols we hear on nearly all radio stations, the holiday specials on the tube. Jimmy Stewart is once again finding his wonderful life, and Frosty is melting all over the ether. Hallmark has a new one tonight, Finding Christmas, and I know if we watch it that I’ll tear up during the commercials. Such a sentimental marshmallow I am. What seem like a hundred or more bowl games will soon begin making their ubiquitous appearances. Lots of NFL action today but nothing of interest in golf, the Franklin Templeton Shootout and the Father/Son Challenge. Whoopie do. The real golf season doesn’t get started until the AT&T at Pebble Beach in February and the match play World Golf Championship at the end of February here in Arizona, the Cadillac World Championship in Florida in early March, and Arnie’s invitational in late March. Then the Masters in April and another year of golf from then on, with Tiger trying once again to win a major. I hope he does just to quiet the talking heads who keep saying they doubt he can win another.

Our two boys, Tiger and Tuffy, are now almost six months old, kitty teenagers and no longer the terrible twos they were just a few months ago. But they’re still driving us crazy. This year we’ll have a non-decorated Christmas—no tree, no table stuff like the fat snowman we got a decade ago, no strings of lights hanging anywhere. The boys would have everything on the floor just after we put it up, chewing on Mr. Snowman, on the downed light strings, on the upended tree. We love them dearly, and they’re so very sweet . . . when they’re sleeping. But when they’re awake, oh my. Yesterday morning while I was golfing, Rosalie heard a loud crash in the laundry room, rushed there to find the million glassy remains of a Mason jar in which she’d kept tiny multi-colored glass beads. The boys had discovered it on the window sill behind our freezer, and one had climbed up on a nearby paper shredder, then leaped onto the window sill and decided to see what would happen if a curious paw could move the jar thing to the edge. And down it came to the tiled floor, with glass shards and glass beads everywhere—under the freezer, under the washer and dryer, into the food and water dishes, into the litter box. I’m so sorry Rosalie had to clean it all up. I’m so glad I wasn’t here to witness the devastation.

And Charlie just sits and watches these two bad boys, shaking his head at their misbehavior. He’s such a good fellow. And Tiger and Tuffy will soon leave their teens and become responsible adults. End of childhood and into manhood. Sort of sad to see them leave their kittenhood, but then, as with our own children, it was nice to have an empty nest. This won’t be an empty cat nest, but we’ll be able to put trinkets and trees out again without worrying that the boys, now men, might pull anything down to see how much noise they can make.
People who aren’t owned by dogs or cats don’t know what they’re missing. A few years ago, Rosalie’s sister Bonnie, who died last year at ninety-five, spent a horrific five months alone in her house during an unusually cold winter, alone except for occasional guests dropping by, the television that she seldom watched, the local radio station telling her about local news and local weather. Not really much company on those long winter days and nights. If she’d only had a dog or cat to share her house and time. Phyllis, Rosalie’s other sister, lived alone in her apartment for the last twenty years before she died recently. How much fuller her life would have been is she’d had a cat or dog to greet her whenever she went for a walk. Dogless or catless people just don’t know what they’re missing.

Just look at the sleeping Tiger, resting in his favorite spot. Isn't he sweet? (As long as he's sleeping.)