Last Call: Meow Mix
Pleszczynski, Wladyslaw
"Last Call: Meow Mix" by Wladyslaw Pleszczynski Meow Mix AMONG THE BOOMER GENERATION'S many achieve ments one is particularly well known -its decision to delay having children by about a decade. Less...
...Recently at the vet's I was warned that cats should never be fed chocolate...
...My father wasn't, and it took years before they won him over, a not atypical phenomenon...
...I also found out something about their longevity...
...CATS AND BOYS ARE ANOTHER MATTER...
...I was there on a graduate student exchange, when a Foreign Service couple based in the Ukrainian capital asked me to cat-sit while they returned stateside for six weeks...
...In the best of worlds, which she may yet discover, dogs and cats live under one roof...
...Many more distrust open shows of affection, and cats, as we know, are models of touchy-feely decorum when they're in the mood...
...No offense to all the wonderful apparatchiks I had to deal with by day, but those cats were the best part of my exchange experience...
...Less well known is what boomer couples did in the interim when they did not have children: they had cats...
...He teaches you something about habit, routine, and composure, and - as his nervous ears will tell you -confirms the underlying fear that these quiet pleasures too will pass...
...He would then reappear for some laptime and purring, go outside for a bit, and return to spend the rest of the evening dozing under a desk lamp or atop the sofa, wherever adult company happened to be...
...I paid attention to Life magazine after its profile of actress Kim Novak showed her in the company of the many Siamese she owned...
...Though he was the one injecting class warfare into the discussion, he once suggested that coming from east European stock I had socialist genes, and that cat ownership was one of their manifestations...
...Their two tabbies had the run of a three-bedroom, three-bathroom apartment spacious enough for five or six Soviet families...
...I paid attention to Time magazine because its book reviews often seemed to run photos of the author in question with a cat on his lap or shoulder or writing table...
...One old friend and colleague, who's had to work hard for everything he's achieved, disdains them for their airs of pampered, privileged ease...
...A calm of sorts resumed once the boys started going to school, but the cat was never completely at ease until he was sure they were sound asleep for the night...
...In a city where most cats were of the homeless variety this pair nibbled at American catfood and pawed at American kitty litter, and slept in a warm bed (mine...
...The women spoke admiringly of my well-behaved cat, and the only contentious moment came when the eight-year-old made a disdainful reference to dogs...
...Most self-respecting conservatives I know have no use for cats...
...IT HELPS IF YOU ARE RAISED WITH THEM...
...Which might explain why they came to think of these cats as well-behaved children, and why the children they later had tend to behave like unruly animals...
...The point was driven home to me nineteen summers ago in Kiev, USSR, of all places...
...Another woman spoke wistfully of her own two cats who'd lived about that long...
...Ultimately, many on the right openly suspect that there's something effeminate (read liberal) about liking cats...
...We were lucky enough to inherit a pedigree Siamese, which, to my mind, added to the allure of growing up in melting pot America...
...A mother and her eight-year-old daughter were there to have their new kittens de-wormed, successors to two cats who'd died at i9 and zz, respectively...
...L A S T C A L L by Wladyslaw Pleszczynski Meow Mix AMONG THE BOOMER GENERATION'S many achieve ments one is particularly well known -its decision to delay having children by about a decade...
...OF COURSE, I CONFESS THAT IN TYPICAL boomer fashion I am generalizing entirely from personal experience...
...For one thing, many claim to be allergic to them, something to do with dander and airborne cat hair...
...THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE FOR CATS remains unmatched...
...As I look back, the longer you have a cat, the more conservative an act having him becomes...
...Having him also contributed to my journalistic development...
...After ours were born our cat quickly learned to stay out of their curious, grabby way...
...An old bachelor type came in to buy special catfood for "Muffy" and "Balfour...
...IN TIME IT BECAME OBVIOUS that cat ownership is a mark not so much of a cat's pampered life as of our own...
...94 September r 9 9 6 • The American Spectator...
...Life was imitating art back then: I'd already seen Novak with a Siamese in Hitchcock's Vertigo...
...It would make their day, I'm sure, to learn that another old friend and colleague who always and lovingly referred to our male cat as "she" went on to write for the Washington Post and the New Yorker...
...Better still, she traveled with them by car, a far more enticing invitation to the open road than any Jack Kerouac could offer...
...In those days, like my younger son today, I couldn't understand why I couldn't take my cat to school...
Vol. 29 • September 1996 • No. 9
