Freya is sitting on my lap as I type this. She's purring like a muffled V-8 engine where one of the cylinders is missing a stroke. Or maybe it's more like the slant-6 on the old Plymouth Valiant. Anyway, it's loud for a cat.
I'm playing easy to get and lavishing her with attention so that she won't feel the need to sleep on my head tonight. Not that she slept on my head last night. She found somewhere to hide instead. This morning, the only evidence I had that she hadn't run off or gotten trapped down in the caves was that her food was gone and her litter box had been recently used.
But I hear that if you play hard to get with cats they sleep with you. I'm all for having a cat on my lap. It's one of life's true pleasures. But there are certain intimacies I prefer to restrict to my own species.
Perhaps it's because of a trauma I suffered many years ago in my youth. I was about 29 when a friend went away for a week. In exchange for looking after her cat, she let me drive her sports car. The cat was just a young thing, a street cat my friend had taken in. Let's call her Stella. Stella had been in for all its shots, but they were waiting until after she'd gone into heat the first time to do the operation that would prevent unwanted kittens.
As it happened, Stella experienced her first estrus while she was in my care. I knew the signs well having spent some time in a place where cats were encouraged to multiply. But I had never seen a cat in heat who wasn't allowed to run out and take care of her needs. This poor kitty was in distress, yowling and writhing. I called the animal hospital and described the situation. "Is there anything I can do to make her more comfortable?"
"Well," said the young woman, "you could take a cotton swab, like a q-tip, lubricate it with something like vaseline, and stimulate her vaginal opening. That might make her more comfortable and even help it end sooner."
Did I do it? Did I create a tiny cat dildo and then manually stimulate a kitten to the point where she got what she needed?
On one side of the issue was potential humiliation. On the other side was leaving a poor creature in distress. When I have a choice like this, I have a motto: The Dwarf does the difficult thing.
Was it good for Stella? I don't know, but she seemed a bit calmer afterwards.
As for me, there's a reason that I didn't have q-tips in my house even before they turned out to be deadly.
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