Over a year ago, before we clipped her wings and turned her into a furry, four-legged, “jailbird”, our cat, Boo, was what you might call a free range cat.
She had total access to the neighborhood and enjoyed life “on the lamb’’.
To our dismay, though, her previous free life style gifted us with many a furry creature, both winged and 4-legged, and cost us thousands of dollars in vet bills, due to her indiscriminate and highly unhealthy eating habits.
Rather than get a second mortgage on the house, in order to maintain her lustful lifestyle, the Princess and I decided to permanently “ground her”.
Unfortunately for us, before we had the chance to implement “said new grounding policy”, one evening, the little bugger decided to introduce us to one of her more unhospitable, rat friends.
True to our loopy lives, the “introduction” had to be with a LIVE, slightly comatose rat, during a rather frustrating conversation that we were having with our inept (rarely accessible, now EX) cable company.
Ms. Delilah Dinwiddie, customer service representative of our illustrious, local cable company, was not comprehending (for the third attempt by me that evening) why our costly (rarely functioning), cable service wasn’t working on that particular evening.
As I was patiently attempting, for the fourth time that night, to reach some level of comprehension with the dull-witted Ms. Dinwiddie, I heard the Princess jump out of our Lazy Boy rocking chair and commence to using expletives that even I, with my colorful repertoire of descriptive adjectives, found utterly unfamiliar.
Being thoroughly preoccupied with my phone conversation, with the delightful Ms. Delilah, I saw Boo casually drop a fury, inert object onto our living room floor, and indifferently assumed that it was one of her toys, or some other play thing that she regularly found entertaining.
I really didn’t understand what the Princess had her knickers in a knot over, at the time, and I continued my ditzy dialogue with the ever daft Ms. Dinwiddie.
Suddenly, I noticed what I mistakenly thought was a toy, take on a life of its own, and regain consciousness, only to scurry across our wooden floors; adroitly disappearing into our home’s entryway area, in front of the closet.
At that point, the Princess had become even more descriptive and animated in her oral depiction of what was happening, and I aptly decided that maybe we needed to continue the conversation with the didactic Ms. Dinwiddie at a later time that week and forego the palatable pleasures of watching cable tv for the remainder of the evening.
“After all,” I calmly assured myself, “my reading habits had become atrocious, lately, and missing one evening of reruns might actually be beneficial.”
“Who knows? I reasoned further, “I might even dust off my copy of Tolstoy’s, “War and Peace” and take another stab at it.”
I then deftly ended my conversation with Ms. Delilah and turned my undivided attention to the situation at hand.
In the meantime, the Princess had procured one of our garden rakes and was banging around in the closet, presumably to entice the rat to find another more hospitable establishment.
Shrewdly deciding that we needed another plan of action, I relieved Princess Leia of her lightsaber (lest she do any further damage to our recently painted closet), bent over, and stuck my head in, to methodically inspect the closet.
The wily, wiry-tailed, Willard, who was actually behind us the entire time, suddenly appears from out of the blue, and makes a mad dash for the closet between our legs!
This, in turn, frightened the bejesus out of me, and caused me to unexpectedly lurch, at the already wobbly Princess.
Totally losing her balance, she tumbled backwards, and unbeknownst to us, precariously on top of the front doorbell.
Upset with the rat’s presence in our home, and slightly agitated with the doorbell’s earsplitting rendition of the Westminster’s bells, I eye-balled the fallen Princess and accusingly remarked,
“We don’t have enough uninvited guests tonight, we need MORE!?”
Benevolently ignoring my sarcasm and blatant disregard for her well-being, the Princess astutely concludes that it was her fall that created the chiming doorbell, and then suddenly observed Willard’s wiry tail scrambling up my favorite winter jacket and across the top of the coat rack.
As the vertically challenged Princess quickly attempted to corral the little bugger into one of our shoe boxes, I decided (just as quickly) to relinquish the “relocation of said creature” to Princess Leia and her lightsaber; and auspiciously chose to retire to the comforts of my boudoir, to get a jump start on Tolstoy, and soothe my otherwise unsettled nerves.
“After all”, I reasoned, “I handled the simple-minded Ms. Dinwiddie, and this rat invasion has me totally out of my bubble and thoroughly wigged out!”
Twenty minutes later, the Princess stoically informed me that “Willard was gone”, and was pathetically soliciting my impartial assistance with “the little mess on the patio deck”.
Hm…
Ok.
I reluctantly opened the bedroom blinds of my patio door, and ostensibly noticed the Lazy Boy, along with a number of other living room furniture pieces, was precariously perched on the outside deck.
It was then, that I inherently knew, that Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” would be dutifully waiting another 30 years or more, before I had another awe-inspiring opportunity to read it.
Oh well…..
Remember, People: at one time or another, we all end up with “rats” in our life.
Unfortunately, some of them just may come in the two-legged variety, and require more than a gentle nudge of a lightsaber to handle.
Have a great day!
And I’ll catch ya next adventure, looking at life from my shoes!
Life in Lucie's Shoes 