It was rare that a photo of me in my childhood didn’t include one or several of our family pets. MC the Cat wasn’t in any of them, however…
This story is a bit short to include in my Friday Blog a Book series, but I still find it amusing enough to share. Remember how I reported on my efforts to hire the family pets to sleep on my bed and scare the ghosts away? MC was not one of the pets willing to join the effort. Here’s why.
While Demon had been an enthusiastic supporter of the ghost protection racket, MC never was, with good reason. He was a tom cat’s Tom Cat— as white as Demon was black, somewhat diminutive in size, and totally dedicated to scattering his sperm. Unfortunately, his small size meant that he often came out on the losing end in his battles with larger toms over fair kitty’s love. He would arrive home beat up and battered. One time a chunk of his ear was missing. Another time it was the tip of his tail. Pop decided that drastic measures were called for. M.C. would have to have to lose his offending appendages. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot of money in our family for veterinary bills. Our Italian neighbor, Papa, suggested an Old Country solution, a cheap way to castrate a cat.
“All you need is a pair of tin snips, a burlap bag, gloves, a pocket knife and a rope,” he suggested. Alarm bells should have gone off all over, but they didn’t. We moved ahead with the medical procedure.
While M.C. had never been a paragon of feline domesticity, he was at least partially tame. He even managed a brief purr when I picked him up the morning of his ‘operation.’ Any previous pretensions of tolerating people ceased instantly, however, when his legs were tied up and he was dumped into the dark gunny sack. When Pop cut a slit in the burlap with his pocket knife and reached a gloved hand through, he was met by claws of fury. M.C. had shed his ropes faster than Houdini.
No one, but no one, was going to grab him by the testicles and snip them off with a pair of tin snips. He clawed his way out of the bag and became a white blur as he disappeared into the Graveyard. After that we would only see him at dinner time and then only after we had put his food down and walked several feet away. Who could blame him.
