There are dog people and cat people. I am decidedly a dog person. I revel in their devotion and their willingness to please and comfort their loved ones. Cats on the other hand know that they are highly superior beings that deign to spend time with humans. Some are more loving than others, but most just want to be fed and petted on their terms.
They have a special affinity for those who are highly allergic to them. Cats seek out my husband, going to great lengths to escape from any confinement their owners have put them in out of deference to his allergies. They immediately find him and wind themselves as close to his nose as they can get, climbing the backs of chairs and leaping on couches to get near him.
Ping and Pong
One memorable pair of cats were two owned by my spinster aunt. She was a bit eccentric and interesting. She spent many years in the foreign service -- stints in Moscow during Stalin's regime, a tour of duty in Copenhagen, Denmark, followed by a tour of duty in Salzburg, Austria, just as the 1956 Hungarian Revolution broke out. When she returned home, she worked in DC and bought herself a little townhouse in Georgetown. I loved to visit her, see the sites in DC and hear of her travels.
My aunt also had two Siamese cats -- Ping and Pong. They were diabolical and quite spoiled. She adored these two creatures. They were handsome (to some, not me) with their cross-eyes and angular faces. They also had frightening grey teeth. How do I know their teeth were grey? I saw them as they sunk them into my flesh on more than one occasion. They also had a full complement of weaponry on their paws -- talons, not claws. Again, I learned by experience. I did try to get to know them, but was instantly rebuffed with hideous hissing. My aunt suggested that I ignore them, passing their bad behavior off as simply excess devotion to their beloved owner. I tried to follow her directions. Ping and Pong for their part would not comply and ignore me (or any other visitor).
My mishaps with these two lovelies were inadvertent. After several hissing encounters, I would carefully try to determine if they were present in the room, then pick the least cat-attractive place to sit. The one place that I could not tell where they were was in the kitchen. On more than one occasion I had an unpleasant cat encounter. For example, my aunt asked me to get something from the refrigerator. When I went to open the door to the frige, a missile came barrelling at me from the little space above the frige. That was when I came to see and know the grey teeth. My aunt thought it was quite amusing. She brushed off the attacks with a note that the cats often lounged above the frige in the tiny warm space between frige and cabinet. I subsequently learned that the cats patrolled the entire kitchen from their vantage point above the frige. Everywhere in the kitchen was their domain. The counters, like the frige, were off limits. They would attack with their toe-talons any unsuspecting person reaching for something on the counter. They were fast, sneaky and quite frightening. They would bite and scratch without provocation.
When visiting my aunt, I learned to avoid the cats -- Ping and Pong -- and listened graciously to her cat stories. They were usually neither interesting nor amusing except to their devoted owner, my beloved aunt. It was a valuable lesson that one man's feast is another man's poison.
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