My cat Mario and I have a lot in common. We are more alike than you might think a man and a cat could ever be.
To begin with, we are both old now, more days behind us than ahead of us. He is almost 18 in cat years and I am a little more than 10 in dog years.
We both have a touch of arthritis. We are incredibly picky eaters and very lucky guys to have found people to love us in spite of our quirky ways and our tendency to occasional outbursts of crankiness.
We have both lost brothers and are sometimes lost ourselves in our loneliness. We’ve given up a lot of the things of our youth. Neither one of us spends much time playing any more. That doesn’t mean we are unhappy, just that we’ve lost interest in some of the things that used to captivate us.
Mario still goes outside and enjoys doing so but he never leaves the property now and I rarely do as well. Our worlds are shrinking and I like to think that is by choice. We both love our backyard these days and when Mario sees me lounging in a lawnchair under one of our maple trees, he reaches for me to pick him up and sit him in my lap so I do.
Sometimes he sunbathes on the patio and falls asleep. I lie back in my chair and saw off in the shade.
But we do differ in some ways. He has a couple of more legs than I have and a long tail. All I can offer concerning his latter feature is a tailbone. Had I been ripping around the planet a few million years ago, who knows? I might have had a tail longer than his.
Mario isn’t much interested in human food and he doesn’t have to worry that I will eat his. He will still chase a rodent if one makes the mistake of crossing his path but his skills in that field have gone downhill. I haven’t hunted a wily groundhog since my days on the farm though I did chase one out of our yard a few years ago.
Mario sits on more laps than I ever do. He sleeps all day and wanders around at night. I napped during the day more in my twenties than I do in my seventies but like my younger self, I am still a nighthawk. As I write this, it is 4:45 a.m.
Added to these differences are our medications. He gets rabies shots once a year, I get a flu shot. We give him a little paste which helps reduce his furballs. I have no issue with furballs. I also don’t have to take any substance to ward off fleas. Flies and bees follow me around like rockstar groupies when I am outside but the fleas leave me alone.
But there is one major medication area where we are totally alike. (You knew something just had to be coming after reading all this, didn’t you.)
Mario and I both take the same laxative. It is made for humans but the vet recommended it for the cat as well. I pick it up at the pharmacy. We hide his in his soft food so he won’t detect it and refuse to consume it.
But I am braver than my cat. I pour mine in a saucer and lap it up.
Cat and man do have our issues but, all in all, we’re just a couple of totally regular guys.
©2023 Jim Hagarty
