Neo in his favorite chair, San Mateo, 2001
We live with gifted creatures. Intelligent beyond our understanding, we're lucky they tolerate us and our Neanderthal ways.
The oldest, Ninja, enjoys accosting expensive gabardine trench coats and sleeping smack in the middle of the floor in a high-traffic area. Some of his favorite toys are air, lint, plastic bags and socks.
His younger sister, Nikita, likes to enforce strict bedtimes by standing on your chest, obstructing your view of the book you were trying to read. She'll do this until you give in and turn off the light, then she'll leave.
Then there's Neo. Neo isn't so much a cat as he is a muppet, a bear cub, and a bulldog in the shape and form of a cat. He runs the house and there's no way he's not getting what he wants when he wants it the way he wants it.
The other morning at 4:30 a.m. he paid us a visit in bed demanding attention. He doesn't just jump up on the bed and meow. He jumps up onto the foot of the bed and walks up David's side, meowing all the way up to the headboard where he stands on top of the books, meowing and rubbing his cheeks on the bindings as they slide this way and that off the headboard.
He'll stay there until I can get my hand up to pull him down onto the bed, where he'll sometimes settle on the fleecey blanket near my feet, but oftentimes he'll make several more laps around the bed, meowing, rubbing, and walking on your hair.
He made another lap and as I tried to get him down, he stepped onto my clock radio, which has several buttons on top of it. One turns on the radio, one turns it off, one is the snooze and one turns on the CD player.
I heard the buttons clicking and started to get annoyed. I was struggling to get my hand around his shoulder to pull him toward me and called his name loud enough to rouse David. Now we were both awake at 4:30 a.m. and annoyed at Neo for being a giant needy baby.
As I tried to wrangle him off the radio he stepped onto the CD Play button and a second later we heard the soothing Sounds of Nature's ocean waves. As he jumped onto the bed, David and I simultaneously said, "Hey, that sounds nice..." and put our heads right back down on the pillows and back to sleep.
3 comments:
Aren't the lil ones just precious...
Chirper used to like to sleep on your face so that you would wake up choking on a furball...
Mabel just likes to stand on the edge of the bed and tap me with one paw--more and more aggressively until I either get up or shake a pillow at her.
Our late great dog-in-a-cat's-body Barney used to wake me (NOT the wife, just me) with an old wrestling move: the Coco-Butt! (Thanks to Bobo Brazil.)
He'd stand on my chest and bump his forehead into mine until I woke up, then pretend like he hadn't done anything (except sit on my chest). I miss that guy.
They are so hilarious - love the head butt - that's original. Thankfully, none of ours is evolved enough to have thought up the head butt or the tap.
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