The other day, my dad, watching me make a sandwich while my kitty-boys twined themselves around my legs and tried to coax me into dropping some lunchmeat into their greedy, adorable little paws, made the following quip:

“Anyone who thinks they’re ready to be a parent ought to try living with three cats first.”

You know, every once in a while, Dad displays a startling level of insight.

***

(Incidentally, have I mentioned I have three cats now? I didn’t set out to become a crazy cat guy or anything, but the way this situation developed… Basically, this new female cat showed up in our barn a couple years ago. She was obviously young and, although a bit stand-offish, much friendlier than the usual transient barn cats we get around the Bennion Compound. Our working hypothesis is that she had been somebody’s pet, rather than a feral animal, and some jackass didn’t want her anymore and dumped her, and then she somehow found her way to us. Well, there are a lot of other cats in the neighborhood and it didn’t take long before the poor thing was knocked up and very, very confused and unhappy. As I said, she appeared to be young, and possibly didn’t understand what’d happened to her. In the past, when the feral cats who hang around have had kittens, my parents and I haven’t found them until they were already mobile and quite wild. In this case, mother and children were accessible, and irresistible in the wake of Shadow’s death not long before. Three of the kittens ended up imprinting on me. Evinrude, Hannibal, and Jack — a.k.a. my kitty-boys — are now indoor-outdoor cats who pretty much have the run of the Compound, while their mother mostly stays out in the barn and wants as little to do with her brood as possible. And somehow, just like that, I’m a crazy cat guy.

I won’t mention Mom and Dad’s two cats, who bring the grand total around the Compound to six. Shadow would no doubt be appalled if he knew his territory had been overrun with the other kind. And yes, animal activist types, they’ve all been fixed.)