The Long Introduction

We used to be a two cat family. It was me, Louie and Gigi. I was always Louie's girlfriend but Gigi loved him anyway. He made it known that he was merely tolerating her.

When Louie died it was traumatic for both of us but Gigi and I got to be better friends through our grieving. We watched Animal Planet together which was odd seeing that I'm not much on watching television. There aren't any cat shows on Animal Planet so we watched dog shows and talked about what dipnoids they were. The dogs, that is. Gigi always watched the screen, fascinated.

A couple of years before that she'd come face to face once with one of the neighbor dogs, Ginger. An overzealous puppy then, Ginger asked for and got herself a nose whipping that day. I'd never heard such bawling in my life from the dog but I found it interesting that Gigi didn't leave the scene of the assault. She seemed to want the dog around despite her violent outburst. I got in my mind, for no particular reason, that Gigi might actually be friendly to the right dog.
I don't think she was in any way, prepared for the dog that I brought home. A dozen pounds headed for sixty, this animal was not nearly so tolerable as the ones we'd seen on tv. For one thing, we couldn't turn it off and it seemed to suck all the air right out of the room. Then of course, she also had me, saying clever things to her like:

Gigi, it's probably a good thing you don't have a tail...

She became disgusted in a matter of minutes and went to the basement - for six months.

Fast forward to yesterday where we see the long arm of a tail-free cat, jutting out the crack of a door, jabbing punches at a teenage pit bull who hasn't been on a walk in eight weeks.



Note: Many thanks to those of you who have made a donation this week to Stella's Patellas. The website says she's at $590. but I've yet to add what's arrived in my mailbox (bringing the total to a whopping $1,020.00). You people rock.