Grandpa The Cat!

. . . As you have never seen her before.

Hello. I had many important sociopolitical points to make today, trenchant observations about the lamentable state of national affairs. But journalists sometimes have to exercise battlefield triage, to make room for compelling breaking news. So.

Grandpa the Cat has allowed herself to become part of the family.

You know the tale by now. Truncated version: Stray cat left to die in a cat carrier in sweltering summer heat. Rescued by Rachel and Lexi. Cat was a hissy, pissy, violent, threatening, feral un-civilizable monster, inflicting grievous rip-and-scratch-and-gouge damage to Rachel’s legs, feet and arms while confined to the basement, where she (Grandpa) finally committed the ultimate insult by defiantly popping out three kittens. We kept the name we gave her, and she kept her foul temperament. She was a snarling, ungrateful, perpetually infuriated, ill-mannered Helen Keller; we were searching for a water pump. Eight months passed.

There were tiny milestones. Some time ago, Grandpa swiped me, but with her paws retracted. It was a soft bop, the way she disciplines her children. It seems to have meant something.

Finally, the other day, Grandpa allowed me to pet her for an extended period:

What happened? I think we’ve been simply, slowly, exposing Grandpa to an astonishing realization: These people might not be your mortal enemies, after all. They feed you. They have not, at least yet, stuffed you or your kittens into a dog-meat grinder. They have talked to you for months, as though you were one of them. What the hell?

From the start, Grandpa had always been a bit more tolerant of me than of Rachel. At every approach, I got hissed at and threatened, but generally not mauled. Not so for Rachel, whose great sin, to Grandpa, was that Rachel was constantly petitioning for affection, which was invariably rebuffed. “There will be blood,” Grandpa was growling.

Yesterday, the big news: Grandpa let Rachel pet her. It came on a frigid morning in a kitchen filled with post-breakfast clutter. Rachel wore no stage makeup. Her hair was utile. The angles are terrible, the obstructions annoying. But great breaking-news videographers must make do with what they are given. They know that chaos bolsters the immediacy of the moment:

As you will see, the scene was broken up by jealous barking from Lexi; Grandpa departed in a huff, as usual.

A Lexi-grandpa detente is the next milestone. It will not be easy.

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And there you have it. Obviously, you have questions, the most cinematic of which is, “Was there a water-pump moment?”

Rachel has a theory.

It began, she thinks, on the day we took Grandpa’s kittens away, to be spayed and neutered. She wailed disconsolately all through the day they were gone. But then they were back! We hadn’t destroyed them or given them away. That might have started a dim understanding that, on some level, we were not complete malignancies bent on increasing her misery.

It finally crystallized, Rachel believes, in an issue of territoriality: Because of the cat’s unwillingness to approach us, and her fiercely protective stance toward her kittens, we always fed all of them in the basement, their principal lair. To get fed, Grandpa had to watch us invade that lair. We didn’t see Grandpa all that much. Recently, as the kittens got way more house oriented, we began to feed them all upstairs, in the kitchen. To avoid starvation, Grandpa had to join us. Which allowed her to observe our banal, nonviolent interactions with her progeny.

Suddenly, she was a guest, welcomed into our territory, but could leave whenever she wanted. The door remains always open, now.

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Your second question is, “how are the kittens?”

I put this question to Rachel. Her answer was:

“They are dicks.”

I bristled. “They are very affectionate!”

“Look at them, Gene.”

She pointed to the kits, on the kitten kitchen floor, jostling each other for a spot at a bowl full of kibble, assing each other out for better position, like basketball big men in the paint.

“Yes, but…” I said.

“You think Francine wants to make a difference in the world?” Rachel said.

“You think Canarsie wants to give back to the community?” Rachel said.

“You think Pittsburgh dreams of being the first to solve the Goldbach Conjecture, proving that every even integer greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers?” Rachel said.

“They’re dicks,” she pronounced.

“Fine,” I said.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

Thanks.

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Hey, I hope that after the midterms, if it goes as we hope, one of the New York tabloids has the guts to go with this front page headline:

USA to Trump:

Fuck You

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The reason for the poll is that Rachel and I are considering turning the Grandpa saga into a book — either for children or adults — and I want to gauge if it is broadly appealing. The cat people like it and comment a lot. How about the rest of you?

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Do you have questions and observations?

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Do you have a few pennies for cat sustenance?

Good. We’re done.