Ready or Naught

Ready or Naught

Meet Jenna and Bob, a loving couple. Particularly appropriate because this story is being kicked off on Valentine’s Day, 2020. It would be a sad thing to initiate a bit of fiction on the annual celebration of love with marital mismatch, divorce or worse. So pinkie-swear: no shouting, splits or missing persons.

Not, of course, that the tale will be told in one sitting. One story in the previous, highly recommended collection¹ took six months to resolve. But still and all, J&B will remain as intertwined as the malts in Scotch whiskey of the same label.

Meanwhile you will be pleased to have this story in hand before next Valentine’s Day. To wit: According to Durex®, a condom manufacturer, sales bump up 25 percent on VD, which indicates a high expectation of “getting lucky.” A competitor, LifeStyle®, conducted market research in 2006 and estimated that 30 million women in the U.S. do “it” on VD, and condoms were applied at the rate of about 87 per second. That sounds all upside, doesn’t it? Fun without risk? Maybe.

A report in that highly estimable online journal of oddities, TheDailyBeast.com², indicates danger. People, particularly sedentary people, have a higher than average risk of heart attack during and for two hours subsequent to romantic frolic.

The article, by Kent Sepkowitz, further states:

“Wikipedia has an entry called, ‘Death during Consensual Sex’ which addresses the issue and lists with Wiki obsessiveness the more than a dozen famous people who died this way, including a Pope³ and a famous writer and of course, Nelson Rockefeller.”

So buy those condoms, but maybe gym membership as a New Year’s resolution would demonstrate sage forethought. No need to hit VD coronarily ill-prepared.

Back to J&B. (Not the Scotch. At 7:46 a.m.? Are you kidding? I do want to make some kind of progress here, whether or not “It’s always 5 p.m. somewhere.”)

Bob and Jenna are not sedentary (gym members, both) and therefore low risk regarding VD coupling, and are the happy parents of Gillespie, a Pom. Cute as a button, this little girl is one of those blond Pomeranians and, like her kinfolk, possessed of that flattened canine face that makes such breeds appear baby-like, hence super-duper lovable to we susceptible humans. Or, rather more accurately, a variety we have made more “lovable” via careful breeding over the centuries, shaping those wolf-like ancestors into something pint-sized and cuddly.

Then too—as you, being a reader with a wide range of interests, have almost certainly heard⁴—we managed to breed better facial muscles into our camp-following mutts. Domestic dogs can raise an eyebrow. Wolves cannot. Dogs can thus soundlessly question our motives. Wolves already know and need not. Dogs can generate a “hang-dog” expression, exhibiting at least temporary remorse for chewing a shoe or shredding a sheep. Wolves just run off with the snack.

Gillespie is way shorter than her name, and is therefore graced with the hypocoristic⁵ “Gilly.” With a hard G.

Gilly is generally well-behaved, except for one bad, bad⁶ habit.

I’m sad to report that Gilly chases cats.

What she would do with a cat if she caught one is as impossible to know as what a car-chasing dog might do faced with similar success. Gilly weighs all of nine pounds, so most any adult cat is in her weight division, and cats don’t wear gloves. But, unless cornered, cats prefer flight over fight.

Last Friday (VD), Gilly was out in the backyard for her morning constitutional, spotted Bella, a calico neighbor, and gave chase. Bella vaulted J&B’s picket fence and made her escape, leaving Gilly yapping in her wake. Still, Gilly counted this as a win, strutting back to her doggy door in high fettle.

Bella proceeded through a garden surprisingly green, given the time of year, to her own port of entry/exit. She pranced past kale and collards, cabbage and Brussels sprouts and then made her way to a sunny spot on the living room windowsill and curled up for a well-earned nap.

At this point it seemed appropriate to tell Bella’s folks that she was living on borrowed time. Bella, you see, is almost five years old, and indoor-outdoor cats live an average of just over four. It’s a mean world out there, with cars, owls and coyotes taking a regular toll on small furry creatures. So, Mary? Jeanne? Listen up:

I know Bella likes to run around outdoors, stalking things, catching some, eating a few, bringing gifts home, but is it worth the risk? You want a cautionary tale? I’ll give you one.

It was back around 1990, in the last century (and doesn’t that make me feel old!), that I found Azulapanula twenty feet up on a limb, crying and mewling. She hadn’t come in the night before. She didn’t seem able to move much, so I retrieved an extension ladder and went up. The poor thing seemed completely limp and her back was crooked. A veterinary examination revealed talon marks in her skin and a broken spine.

There was nothing to be done.

Mary pipes up, “Where’d you find a name like that?”

Zula (a hypocoristic) had blue eyes. That’s where the Azul came from, and when I first found her, half-starved, the campanulas⁷ were in bloom. She bore a collar that she’d stepped through so it was around her neck and then under one leg. Must have been that way a good long while, because it had worn deep into her skin and partway choked her. That’s why I never put a collar on a cat. She was only about a year old at the time, and I lived way out in the woods. No telling where she came from. There wasn’t a near neighbor. She healed and had three good years

I lived on a very quiet dead end road, so cars weren’t a threat. Coyotes hadn’t moved into the region, or not that I knew of back then. Never expected that owl.

Next, I tell Mary and Jeanne, you three aren’t on a quiet road, coyotes have been seen in the neighborhood and I hear barred owls around here all the time.

“Barred owls?” (This time it’s Jeanne.)

I bet you’ve heard them too. “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? Who? Who?” They get to be 25 inches long with a four-foot wingspan.

“Yikes!”

Bella looks a lot like hot lunch to a big old owl. That’s why my four are indoor cats.

“Don’t they get bored?”

Got a bird feeder outside a window. Cat TV.

At this point Mary walks over to the door and snaps the cat security hatch shut. “That does it for me. Bella stays in.”

So, you see, thanks to Gilly’s bad habit, we had an opportunity to protect Bella. Think of that closed kitty hatch as a sort of virtual condom for a cat.

Bella got lucky.

On Valentine’s Day no less!

*****

Note: Substack starts footnote numbers anew each time I paste in a story. But footnotes are wildly important and sometimes refer back to previous matters, so I’ve thoughtfully put the correct numbers in brackets, like so [#].

1 [73] Seize You on the Dark Side of the Moo, Brave Ulysses Books, 2019. Highly recommended.

2 [74] Valentine’s Day isn’t just lame, it’s dangerous, TDB, Feb. 13, 2002

3 [75] A Pope! Pope John XII.

4 [76] But perhaps forgotten?

5 [77] If you skipped ahead in this book, you shouldn’t have. But, lame reader that you must be in that case, refer back to footnote #37.

6 [79] Arguably bad. Perhaps not. Time will tell the tale.

7 [80] Lovely blue wildflowers.

****

Copyright© 2020, Cecil Bothwell, All rights reserved.

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