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4 AM Cat Story — In Memorium
It’s 4 AM. I’m awakened, as usual, by the inside/outside cat who desperately wants to be released from the comfortable confines of the house so he can “do his business”. The litter box is for lesser cats — he is far above that. He signals his request by alternately scratching at the wall behind my head and rattling the plastic faux-Venetian blinds.
The deaf cat senses movement within the house when I finally wake up enough to open the nearest door for the inside/outside cat. I don’t know how else to explain how a deaf cat knows there is activity breaking the stillness of the night, as he doesn’t even feel vibrations in the floor when we walk. Perhaps it is the draft of cool air that rushes in and reaches the room where he is resting.
It is usually a few moments after I have settled back into the warmth of my bed that the bathtub howling begins. He knows I’m awake. Not satisfied with his full water dish in the kitchen, he demands his plastic cup of water in the bathtub to be refilled. How he got me to start giving him his bathtub cup is a story for another time. He delights in knocking the cup over in the tub, drinking the water as it spills out, then sorrowfully howling for it to be refilled.
I ignore his demands at 4 AM.
I don’t want to encourage bathtub howling, with the tiled surround providing excellent acoustics that the deaf cat might have appreciated before he lost his hearing. He’s twenty, and very spoiled, but I draw the line at filling his cup at 4 AM when I know his regular dish is full of fresh water (and its heavy enough that he can’t tip it, but on a plastic tray just in case he decides to find some other way to spill it).
Soon, all is quiet in the house again and I fall asleep until 5 or 6 AM when the inside/outside cat “knocks” at the wooden screen door to be let back into the warmth.
