Gomez Philosophy

      Not too long after we moved to the old farm house on Zimmerman – we got a pair of kittens from a litter that neighbors back in Valley Circle Lane had weaned. They were half Persian, and we were only going to get one, but somehow we got a brother and sister. Gomez was black with some white markings on paws and face. Morticia was grey with white fur in the same places as Gomez. Of course, they were named after the main characters on the tv show The Addams Family.

       Morticia was only with us a few months – both cats were indoor/outdoor, and one day Tish did not come back. I heard years and years later that my brothers had found her at the time dead, probably hit by a car, in the gully across from the school which was not that far away.

      But Gomez was with us for ten years. We never had a cat before, not really any pets at all – a turtle that Eric can tell you about who only lived a couple of days, and a dog named Duke and a dog named Buster who did not stay long either because they did not get along with us children and were subsequently given away. So with our lack of experience, Gomez had us thinking he was a normal cat.

      He hunted and brought home birds and mice, sometimes eating them, sometimes leaving parts by the back door. There was a hole in the basement window where the old dryer vent used to be, and Gomez would come and go through that hole – sometimes bringing friends with him.

      One morning I got up and started walking down the stairs in the dark. On the landing, I could hear a commotion, and when my eyes got used to the dark, I was shocked to see a wounded rabbit and Gomez on the landing with me, ignoring me, and glaring at each other!

      When Gomez was hungry, he meowed. He meowed incessantly until he got fed. This is the part that we thought was normal - and it was not until Gomez was long gone and we had all grown up and had other cats of our own and my folks had other cats, that we discovered other cats do meow, but they don't do it non-stop.

      The cat Mike and I have now, Mittens, will cry once to let you know she is on the bed, or perhaps she thinks it is time for us to wake up, or she wants to go out, or maybe she is hungry – but she cries once, and when she knows we have heard her, she stops. Gomez did not do that – when he was hungry he meowed and continued - especially if he knew you had heard him.

      Sunday mornings, Gomez would sit outside our closed bedroom doors and start to cry. Each of us would pretend to be asleep, hoping someone else would wake up and go feed him. No one wanted to get up. And so the meowing continued. Our doors had louvers in them – after a while, Gomez would meow and then strum his paws over the wood louvers. If he was not strumming on my door, I could see his shadow in the morning sun coming through the louvers strumming on Clark's closed bedroom door. I think it was Clark who usually caved first on those mornings – he would be mad, but he would not make any noise himself in the off-chance that everyone else really was still sleeping and not just lying there faking it.

      Well, once we fed Gomez, he would eat everything in the bowl so fast that he often chucked it all back up again. And we did not know any better – just thought that all cats did that!

      So on school days, I was the first one home from school – my folks were both at work. Gomez would meow and meow insistently for food. He was such a pest! He did not appreciate that I did not use the bathroom at school at all all day, and I really needed my first few minutes at home to have some peace in the bathroom. So the noise continued. Finally I would feed him, and the house would be quiet for a while.

It was not too much longer that my brothers would arrive home from school, and it was about this time that the tell-tale sound of Gomez making heaving noises could be heard. I would stop what I was doing to figure out what room of the house the cat was upchucking in and make a mental note to find it and clean it up before Mom got home.

      One day I heard the cat heaving, and I thought it was coming from the basement. Clark and Eric had been going up and down the stairs - so I figured they would take care of the upchuck in their travels. And I forgot about it. About a half an hour later, I was walking down the stairs to the basement, when I saw the pile on one of the steps! I turned around and stomped my feet back up the stairs – yelling the whole time “how can you two walk past this cat puke and ignore it over and over again?”

      I went to the kitchen to get some paper towels, “why is it okay to walk past cat puke and think that it is okay to just let someone else clean it up instead of you?”

      Returning to the step and bending over to clean up the mess, “are you really going to pretend that you have not seen this, or even heard it happen, and just walk right by it over and over again? Because you aren't fooling me into thinking you did not know it was here!”

Both brothers were staring at me as I finished cleaning up the cat puke and I made one more rant, “why didn't you take care of this yourself?” One brother calmly responded, “we both know that you will make a lot of noise, and then you will clean it up.”

      You have to admit, it is a pretty good deal! Most of the time, having to hear all that noise is a small price to pay to have someone else do the chore!

      Over the course of my long work history, the Gomez upchuck story has come to my mind many times – I make a lot of noise, but I'm pitching the fit while doing the work that I'm complaining that someone else should have been doing! One co-worker even asked me one time if I could eliminate the noise and just do what everyone knows I'm going to do anyway!

      And I have also come to realize that I am the one being petty in cases like this (especially in light of the Sunday morning Gomez antics mentioned above, that I usually don't include when talking about the puke on the stairs after school story!) So nowadays, I tend to be a little quieter about it – but every once in a while Mike asks if something or other is bothering me, usually in the workplace, and I'll say, “No, it's just cat puke.”

102 20150412 Cat Puke