My Cat

Norah is really my wife's and my cat, but she tends to favor me ... to my wife's eternal chagrin. When we first got this shelter kitten, she would sleep between our pillows in bed. But now that we, because of my recent back surgery, are sleeping in separate beds, the much older Norah bunks in with me. My wife, for a while, tried to alter this arrangement by kidnapping her and closing doors to preserve this nocturnal separation, but has since given up ... and now Norah is with me the whole night. (In case you are wondering, Norah was named for Norah Jones who was singing on the radio when our new kitten was being brought home.)

Anyhow there is a reason for this blog post ... and that is to try to understand the idiosyncrasies of life. One of the reasons Norah favors me is that I scratch under her chin and between her ears where she obviously can't groom herself. So multiple times a night I perform this ritual to a crescendo of her purring. However, occasionally, for reasons I have never been able to decipher, Norah will resist this favor and bite me. Not drawing blood, but a bite nevertheless ... which pisses me off to the point where I won't pet her again for quite a while. I also think that I am using Pavlovian conditioning to stop this annoying trait ... but no ... even after all these years she still occasionally does it.

I also equate this idiosyncrasy to that incident in Las Vegas where, after years of performing on stage, one of the tigers in Siegfred and Roy's act attacked and almost killed Roy.Why did this tiger do this? It is just one of the mysteries of life ... like why did a mother strap her two children inside a car and push it into a South Carolina lake? Perhaps this is all because civilization has not totally tamed the feral past of all animals ... even humans. This is certainly evident in some of the gruesome events seen daily in the Middle East.

So, back to Norah ... will she some night suddenly decide to rip my face off? This possibility keeps me on my toes.