When I was 7 years old and at the optometrist, I was what’s known as a Little Shit. I didn’t sit still. I didn’t want to read the letters. I didn’t want to do anything except go home. Eventually, my mom bribed me with a kitten. A PERSIAN kitten, freshly purchased from the extremely shady pet shop directly across the street. It worked like a charm, I’m sad to say, because I’m extremely vulnerable to kittens. tbh, considering the way my mom was looking at those kittens, she would have bought one anyway.
My dad says that she always did have a weakness for dumb animals. “It’s why she married me,” he always says. Anyway, this is a story about a Very Dumb Cat, not Heterosexual Hilarity Hour.
This kitten weighed about a pound and I suspect 75% of that was fluff. She was smokey grey, had a perfect little nose (she was what’s called a doll-faced or traditional Persian. No pug faces here!), and had the IQ of a hammer.
I mean this with all the love in my heart, but you could just look into those eyes and absolutely KNOW that there was nothing going on in there. It wasn’t even a case of ‘no lights on upstairs’. There wasn’t even an upstairs. There wasn’t even a ground floor. There was just NOTHING going on in there.
Kiki didn’t understand some simple concepts—-stairs, for example. She never figured them out, even after 7 years of living in a house with stairs. Her preferred method of locomotion was to cry very loudly until someone carried her where she wanted to go. One could argue that this was, in fact, very clever of her.
Please don’t give her the credit. It was pretty clear that she was simply confused about how stairs could go up AND down at the same time.
TBH, she never figured out how to get onto furniture either. She was fully capable of jumping and playing like any other cat, but it seemed as soon as she had to THINK about something, everything else shut down. Like… one day, I was playing with her and a piece of string. She was delighted and jumping and playing. Just normal kitten stuff. Then she decided she wanted to sit in my lap instead. I mean, i SAY “decided”, but it could’ve just been a passing air mote depositing the idea in her head.
The point is, she abruptly forgot how to jump onto furniture. She forgot how to JUMP. She just kinda sat there and stared at me for a few seconds before starting to cry. She was actually pretty distressed by it and didn’t stop until I picked her up for a cuddle. Thankfully, she seemed to forget it pretty quickly. No room for anything besides the moment, I guess.
She also never grew very much. Even as an adult, she barely pushed 3 pounds. She also had a serious dental issue. Her canines stuck straight out horizontally. They weren’t very big so they didn’t push past her lips or anything, but it was the most baffling thing her vet had ever seen.
I loved that dumb animal. She was a very good girl and I miss her.
It’s time for another Installment of Family Lore from my wierd-ass childhood!
Story contains: poor childhood decisions, profanity, extremely poor animal handling practices, and a semi-graphic description of an injury. Mind the content warnings, your health comes first. As usual, all names have been changed to protect everyone’s privacy. rest of the story under the cut to avoid a five-mile post.
*
This is the story of the first time I said the word “Fuck” In front of my mother.
When I was a kid, my parents would drive to Ohio from California every other summer of so to visit my Mom’s family, who never figured out that they can escape. Four days is a long ass time to be a small child in the back of an unairconditioned van with a bunch of rotting bananas but it was worth it for being able to more or less run wild through the Ohio woods.
My mother’s family consisted of my grandparents Polly and Bobby, and her younger brother, Bobby. Bobby has a saint of a wife named Stephanie, and three children. My sister was very fond of cousins Samantha and Amanda.
Due to a combination of Ye Olde Misogyny and post-delivery drugs, for about five generations there, the men had been naming all the children, so literally every AMAB person born into the family was named “Robert” and immediately shortened to “Bobby”. Uncle Bobby very nearly did this to his firstborn, wich would have brought the total number of Bobbies to 8 between the miscellaneous cousins and uncles, when Stephanie put her foot down and named him Jonathan Jackson the second she found out what sex he was.
Cousin JonJack is still my favorite cousin- he has a heart big enough to house every creeping and crawling thing on this planet, and a quiet determination to make things right with the world, even if that means doing something completely batshit insane.
We were camping at a place near West Branch State Park, at what is advertised as a “Luxury Campground next to a Private Lake” but is really an RV collection next to a glorified sump. It has the extremely redeeming feature of being smack in the middle of Northeast Ohio’s dense hardwood forest, and since we had parents that grew up in the area and had passed a reasonable amount of scouting knowledge onto us, we were turned lose after breakfast and told to return by dark or if anyone got hurt. This was splendid, as the woods were full of interesting things like nests of day-old rabbits, their hearts visible as they beat against their delicate rib cages, shimmering black rat snakes longer than we were tall, hives of wild bees, intricate in their geometric structure and remarkably patient as long as you didn’t poke them.
The Sump was even better- it had dozens of baby snapping turtles for the catch-and-releasing, catfish twice the size of any cat, a plethora of bugs and worms and crawdads and families of duck and best of all, Arthur, The Swan.
crows have been documented holding ‘funerals’ for many years. however, researchers suggest that they may not be mourning; evidence indicates that crows may be examining the body & surrounding area for potential threats to the rest of the flock.
This is Snopes-confirmed. Also be aware this is very common in sugar free food of many kinds. The retriever puppy who I know of who died of xylitol poisoning got hold of a pack of sugar-free gum.
Always good to remind folks – if it has xylitol, KEEP IT AWAY FROM DOGS! It induces profound hypoglycemia and liver failure and is life-threatening 😦
DarkestElemental616 