Passenger Cat

We travel six hours with the cat between us in his carrying case. He meows loudly for the first twenty miles, then settles, but when the car slows, he starts up again. Once we are underway, he quiets, although knowing that for certain is impossible because we have all the windows down in our truck and the wind is howling, blowing our hair every which way and threatening to send our baseball caps flying on to the highway. It is summer in Wisconsin and we want all the warm air around us all the time even if it means not hearing the cat’s travel protests.

I would keep him on my lap, pet him all the way, but he’d want to look out the window and, besides, he occasionally bites my hand if my petting is too slow or inept in some way only he can detect. He is a sweet boy though and I don’t hold his occasional lapses against him. He is a cat after all and, as a famous story once posited, “you can’t blame a cat for being a cat.”

This is our foster cat. He walks on our heads in the morning.