PIEPER, the Senior Cat - Pffffttttt!

“Whatever poet, orator, or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.” Sinclair Lewis

Hi friends, Pieper here. Mom is in the laundry room, so I thought I’d sit my fuzzy bottom right here at the computer and tell you what happened to me!

The vet called me a SENIOR CAT!!! And worse yet, Mom agreed with her!!! I’ve rarely been this insulted, let me tell you!

I’m a proud 13 and one-half years old, almost to the day (supposedly 68 in human years). Sure, I sleep a lot, but my baby cat manual said that was what we cats do 90 percent of the time anyway! Why should I change now??? Pfffttt…

The vet actually gave her a book about “Celebrating Seniors!” This happy flap book told Mom that the most common senior diseases in animals (dogs AND cats) were:

Dental problems
Liver disease
Kidney disease
Heart and lung disease
Joint problems
Endocrine system problems (like diabetes)
Cancer
Ocular (eyes to you, and what the heck, we use them twice as much as humans – better at night even! Pfffttt!
Gastrointestinal

Great, so NOW I have to go back in and have a total workup: baseline blood work (I don’t think I like the thought of THAT much, unless the vet is going to squeeze it out of my toenail or something), identify existing health problems by doing x-rays, hormone testing, and EEG of my heart (and I have no problems with any of these now, but just these tests are enough to assure that I DO have one), and then monitoring me so that means even MORE visits to the vet! Oh, joy, oh, joy!

Okay, that’s it for today. I’m so depressed, I think I’ll go eat a sardine or something, have a clump of catnip and then sleep it off. Mom’s on her way back to the office and we sure don’t want her to know that I type or else she’ll want to test for carpal tunnel syndrome!

On Little Cat's Feet??

Feline Metaphors Notwithstanding by Bridget Collins
Published in CATS Magazine, January 1993



The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems (1916) “Fog” US Biographer and Poet (1978-1967)

I could not resist this story. Anyone with felines will definitely know what Ms. Collins is talking about in this story:

***Carl Sandburg wrote about a fog that crept into a city on “little cat’s feet.” If that fog had crept in on my cats’ feet, a panicked populace would have fled their beds, screaming, “Earthquake! Armageddon! The end has come!”

My cats do not creep or slither. They do not glide noiselessly or steal furtively. My cats gallop. Sometimes, they clomp. No brave, clever mouse need ever gird his courage to bell my cats. It would be wasted valor. The ringing of the bell would be lost to the thrum-thrum-thrum of the vibrating floorboards. In my house, “cat-like” and “elephantine” are synonyms.

Are you imaging that these two cats must be huge, lumbering beasts? If so, you are half right. They do lumber, but they are definitely not huge. Seeing them at rest, you might even describe them as slight.

Their mother was a dainty Siamese. Their father was an unknown, errant tom, whom I suspect carried either a Clydesdale gene or a primordial allele hailing back to the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

They were kittens when I named them. I never expected that the years would prove me a sardonic poet. I called the female Isadora, after renowned danseuse Isadora Duncan, because she was lithe and loved to frolic. The irony is that, if a dancer were to move with my Isadora’s grace, critics would applaud her mastery of slapstick and mourn with her the passing of vaudeville.

The male, who is coal black and all but invisible in the night, I named Shadow. In a darkened room, he is undetectable, unless of course, he moves. A cat burglary with Shadow’s talent for stealth would be well-advised to cultivate a palate for prison food.

When my cats walk across a table, the dishes quake. When they jump from a bookshelf, they land with a thud. When they run across the living room floor, each footfall is audible from the back bedroom. I have examined their paws, and found there no traces of jackboot or football cleat. They are both house cats, and so do not sport even a respectable callous. I cannot explain how they manage on padded paws to produce sounds one might expect from a shod mule. I suppose it will remain a mystery. For the time being, I will continue to live with the catcophany, and to laugh out loud every time I hear feline metaphors that liken the movement of cats to a silent, sinewy ballet.***

What else is there to say?