Welcome! – A Wee Blether

The moment I heard his plaintive howls from across the canal, I knew the lonely white cat would be trouble for me.

There was no ignoring this little guy. Perched on the opposite bank, his Persian blue eyes piercing across the water, he called out to my family. Meow! Hello? Meow?

He was persistent, sweet and vulnerable. Yep, this cat spelled trouble with a capital “C.”

First off, my wife loves cats, but she’s hopelessly allergic. In a marriage, this is a lose-lose situation.

If she ignores him, it means her heart has turned to stone. What hope would I have? If she can ignore a sweet, hungry cat, why cook dinner for a lazy husband?

But if she does listen to her heart—and she brings the animal into our home—she’ll be sneezy, runny-eyed and welt-ridden. It’s hard enough to watch three hours of football while your wife does laundry, just try it while she’s in anaphylactic shock. The long ER wait, then the pharmacy drive-thru line—the game would be long over by the time we got home.

Our daughter, though, posed a more immediate problem.

She was already in “9-year-old-girl” love, had named him White Chocolate Chip and cleared a big space in her heart for him.

“Let’s save him!” she pleaded.

Save him. That’s a laugh. Nothing lower on the food chain than a mammal with opposable thumbs and quick reflexes has ever survived in our home.

Most dangerous of all, though, was our 4-year-old son.

He deploys random wrath on anything that wanders into his Circumference of Chaos. Our cousins from the country took one look at him as a toddler and declared him “Sluggo” after cartoon Nancy’s fireplug friend Sluggo Smith from the wrong side of the tracks.

I envisioned Sluggo retrieving Chip’s limp, sodden pelt from the dishwasher, our daughter supine and weeping on the kitchen floor as my distraught wife’s tears atomize into a salty mist in an unrelenting fit of sneezing.

You just can’t enjoy a ball game in that kind of commotion.

Sure enough, the encroachment began with a harmless visit to the woods by my wife and daughter bearing—what else?—canned tuna. Chip bypassed tentative and went straight to bold, rubbing figure eights around my daughter’s ankles.

These tuna drops continued for weeks until I agreed we could adopt Chip and let him live outside. Maybe he’d reject the adoption, I thought, and we wouldn’t have to take him to the vet for shots and neutering.

The Cat Whisperer ended that dream. My 23-year-old daughter could tame a mountain lion at 20 paces. Ten minutes and one scratched boyfriend later, Chip was lounging in our yard like he owned the place.

But I did relax when I realized how cool Chip really is. We were all chatting on the patio when Sluggo slipped away in search of malfeasance. Chip, lounging on the grass, began pawing lazily at droplets of what he may have thought was an evening drizzle.

And there was Sluggo: shorts around his ankles, hands on hips, a 6-foot arch of welcome-to-the-neighborhood glistening in the setting sun.

I yelled. The flow stopped. Chip? He laid his head lazily back down like it was no big deal.

And why wouldn’t he? He was home.