That's our cat, Didzy. He is such a good boy! There is, however, another side to the domestic tranquility--
Our house is a very, very, very fine house
With two cats in the yard
Life used to be so hard
Now everything is easy cuz of you. . . .
that Graham Nash and I associate with content felines. Didzy's sitting on a piece of handiwork meant to cover the radiator that supplies the heat in the renovated "master suite" of my nearly hundred-year-old house. So warm air emanates from those vents he's sitting on, which is why he spends about ten hours a day there. Alas, he also throws up a lot, and, while he knows where to piss and shit, he will not be bothered to remove himself somewhere to vomit. If he'd just hop down, there's nothing for yards and yards but hardwood floors and easy clean up, but, no, he stays right where he is and barfs down those vents. Sometimes in the night, through the mist of light sleep or a dream, I hear him kacking, and in the morning when I wake up and start walking dully around I'll suddenly remember. My first thought then is that I should have been more careful, I might have stepped in it already, which has happened, and for a conceptual moment in time I'll be relieved to find that my feet are unsullied. Then I remember the vents. Sure enough, that's where the puddle is, silky strings of coagulating vomit, little stalactites of cat fur coated with the slime of his digestive tract, tapering downward from the source into the inaccessible nether region of some contractor's notion of faux modernity.
While cleaning I almost always think of one of my favorite "Car Talk" calls. "Car Talk" was the NPR show in which brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi ("Click" and "Clack," as they called themselves), auto mechanics with a shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, took calls from people who had car troubles. Of course many callers thought they were being jacked around by their mechanic (almost always the brothers confirmed their suspicions). Others were women who doubted the wisdom of their husbands and boyfriends on matters related to automobiles (almost always the brothers agreed that the man was nuts and attributed his wacky ideas to state laws requiring men to have opinions about cars). I think the idea for the show came from their customers, many of them graduate students at nearby Harvard: predictably, budding scholars of "comparative literature" or "art history" are at a complete loss about what to do about their failing cars. The brothers were witty and had a lot of fun with the callers before, in the end, according to my dad, who knows a lot about cars, dispensing solid diagnoses and sound advice. When stumped, they'd say so before advancing a theory of the case "unencumbered by rationality."
One day I'm listening and a guy calls in because his big dog, riding up front in the passenger seat, had been overcome with car sickness and vomited all over the dash, quite a quantity, some of it seeping down into the heat vents. Back at home he'd cleaned as best he could, but he noticed that whenever he ran the heat, the car became redolent of warmed over dog vomit. This is just the kind of call the brothers loved, and they had a lot of fun with the caller--much laughter and hilarity, also one possible solution after another advanced and then dismissed until, in the end, they advised the guy to endure the remaining weeks of winter and then sell the car in early summer. There's no help for some things.
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