Charlene Taylor
Our son went up to our garage to work on his car the night it happened. Rob had been gone a while when he called, "Mom, I can't find your cat," He informed me as soon as I answered the telephone.
"What do you mean you can't find my cat!" I exclaimed. The cat had fallen a couple weeks before and had a pin in his hip, the creature wasn't even supposed to be out of the house let alone up at the garage, which something told me he was.
"Well," Rob said, "When I opened the hood of the car Kismet shot out at me," He laughed uneasily, "He scared me half to death, and I was almost up on the tires on the wall before I realized what it was. Then the cat climbed up on the tires and I nearly broke my neck climbing up to get him down."
"Then you got him."
"Well, no, I mean yes, I mean no," Rob was confused. He explained, "I got him and put him in the car, but after I backed the car out of the garage and opened the car door to get out and shut the garage door he escaped."
"Escaped? Escaped where?"
"That's what I'm trying to tell you I can't find him." Then Rob told me he to go someplace and didn't have time to look for Kismet anymore.
"Fine," I said glancing at the clock. It was after eleven o'clock.
After gathering up cat food, my husband and I went up to the garage and started scouring the surrounding area for Kismet. We had to find him. He had to have the pin removed in a few days plus I was afraid he'd get hurt again, he was somewhat of a clumsy cat even at his best.
We'd been there a while and were searching the bushes in a gully behind the garage when a voice suddenly said, "Halt were you are, police!" And a light flooded us like a spotlight on a lower stage. I dropped the cat food and raised my hands more startled than anything.
Then the voice asked, "Bob is that you?"
I dropped my hands as quickly as I'd raised them, "John LaMoria you did that on purpose." I accused starting up the hill toward the local sheriff.
John was laughing, "What are you two doing out here beating the bushes at this time of night?" He wanted to know.
Bob told him about Kismet and added that we were trying to find, "my" cat.
"My" cat? Why was he suddenly "my" cat?
John looked at me, "Want me to call in a dragnet?"
Ignoring that I asked what he was doing there.
He motioned toward the bushes behind the garage, "The people that live over there saw strange lights moving around back here and thought somebody was trying to brake in." John laughed again, "Never thought I'd actually find a couple of cat prowlers."
"Very funny John," I said and informed him the term was cat burglars.
After some brief chitchat in the fall, night air we decided to wait until the next day to look for the cat and to be honest I didn't think we'd never see him again.
On the third day Kismet mysteriously resurrected. My husband called that morning, "I found your cat."
"And?" I questioned not liking the tone of his voice.
"He's under the sidewalk in the back of the garage with a opossum and he won't come out."
I immediately went up to the garage. If anybody could lure Kismet out I could.
The sidewalk ended where the ground sloped down into the gully behind the garage, and evidently the opossum thought this was a good place to make a nest. I could see two pairs of eyes shining back at me when I directed the flashlight beam into the crevice.
After a duration of trying to coax Kismet out, to no avail, I gave up and went next door and hauled Doc Anderson over there. After all a veterinarian should know how to get the cat out.
Doc thought it all extremely hilarious. "He'll come out when he's ready," He laughingly told me and assured me the opossum wouldn't hurt the cat. Then started to add, "You know your cat's a redneck when,"
I shot Doc a side-glance and he refrained from adding, "he's shacks up with a opossum." I'd already heard the term more times that day than I wanted to and was sure people would soon be dancing up and down the streets singing it like something out of The Music man. "Are certain words creeping into his conversation? Words like 'swell,' trouble-trouble-trouble, and, 'so's your old man,' trouble-trouble-trouble and, Redneck cat." Huh? Well, it was all getting about as ridiculous as that, anyhow.
Doc was right. But it wasn't until three weeks later that my husband found the cat on an overhead beam in the basement of the garage. Kismet had certainly taken his time, but he was finally ready to come home.
I find that most people don't want to write, they want to have written. I write just because I like to. I've had a few things published, but have had no desire to make a big deal out of it. I'm afraid that too many people do not take into consideration the commitment they are making when they are under the gun writing contracts and writing to "please." And far to many authors have lost their quality in quantity. Like Dorothy Parker - who was more or less no big deal - I'm more of less a dabbler. Aside from writing I'm a librarian and know well what people like and what they don't. And in other asides I'm also a musician, a gardener, a seamstress, a crafter of various sorts, a computer technician and web designer and anything else that happens to take my fancy. Life is too short to limit your goals to just one thing and my motto is, "If you aim for the moon you might just make it over the back fence." And who knows someday I may just happen to write, "Jingle-Bells."
Another story by Charlene:
A Black Rainbow And An Unsolved Mystery