Love, Birds, and a Disappeared Cat

I’ve told this story before, but some stories are just so unbelievable that they bear telling more than once.

My father who was born in 1913 and died in 2002 loved birds. He especially loved finches. He also loved growing roses. These things weren’t exactly out of character for him but if you met my dad on the street, you’d think he’d have different hobbies. He was also a musician, another thing you probably wouldn’t suspect. He played the piano, saxophone, trumpet, and trombone. He wore short sleeve dress shirts with clip-on ties and gabardine pants with dress shoes. Sometimes he wore golf shirts, if he was golfing. Anyway, my dad owned a Ben Franklin store. He was, as he would say, a merchant. A regular guy who belonged to the local Chamber of Commerce. Anyone you’d ask would say he was a pretty nice guy and they’d be right.

So back to the birds.

My dad loved the birds an awful lot. He replenished their thistle seed every day. He watched them from the kitchen window while he was doing dishes, which he began doing after my mother started putting dirty dishes in the linen closet along with small wads of twenty-dollar bills. But while my dad loved the birds, he didn’t love all creatures.

He hated cats.

He hated cats with his whole heart. There was nothing about cats that he could tolerate. This disgust and great loathing came from one simple fact. Cats go after birds.

It was after dinner on one of the times I visited after my mother died. He started in on his neighbor, how his neighbor let his cat roam around, how he’d gone over to his neighbor a bunch of times to ask him to keep his cat inside, that he knew the cat was murdering the birds, that he had about had it and then thought about shooting the cat but he didn’t have a rifle so he trapped the cat, put it in his car, and drove the cat far out into the country and let him go.

This was a lot to absorb.

A normal reader would be waiting for my indignant reaction to my dad’s kidnapping of the neighbor’s cat. It’ll be a long wait. I was speechless in that moment and still am. The whole episode occupies a unique space in my brain where there is non-stop eye rolling and head shaking and shoulder shrugging, the place where all the inexplicable events in my life are piled, arms and legs sticking up every which way, faces with crossed eyes and lopsided smiles, and a low thrum of chuckling. There is no making sense of a lot of life, you just have to throw crazy stuff on the pile and go on.

Anyway, those are my thoughts tonight. Probably came to me because the birds emptied out my bird feeders today. And my cat, who never goes outside, is in his favorite spot sleeping.