🔝Bella prints out her diary.

Here I am, in a house of madness with a screaming madman. He deludes himself that he is the Cat God. Cat God my ass. He’s no more the Cat God than I’m the Queen of Sheba. He is, no more no less, the Cat Daddy.

I do not disabuse him of the notion that he thinks he’s the Cat God, because he is a good Cat Daddy, I will say that, and moreover, I would never disabuse the hand that feeds me. He takes good care of me. Makes sure I have a full food dish every day, fresh well water every morning and night, fresh litter in the loo at least once sometimes twice a week, catnip treats at what he calls cocktail hour, where he begins his evening regimen of getting sloshed, and thenceforth begins the wailing and the yelling for the Cat Mama, who I also miss but I have enough dignity and emotional restraint not to ‘go on about it.’ I try to tell him it’s time to get over her not being here.

He repeatedly informs me how long it’s been. As of this writing, three years and nine months, time enough, many would say, to move on and make a new start, maybe meet someone else.

But no. I know from his ravings that he has neither the desire nor the will to do that. He tells me he’s not ‘wallowing’ (I think that was the word) in grief, but just plain and simple missing her and railing at the losses in his life. I won’t go though the litany, but the bottom line is that losing his wife was the ‘most unkindest cut of all.’ He often quotes Shakespeare. I don’t think he’s showing off (what?! to a cat!), he just genuinely enjoys reading Shakespeare. Kind of like the Cat Mama enjoyed reading Dickens.

But for all the Cat Daddy’s craziness, I do enjoy his company, especially at night when we retire to the bedroom, he, now mellow with several 80-proof beverages and the goodly weed, and me exhausted from his earlier tantrums. He sits up in bed reading and I settle down on the end of the bed with my own thoughts. Sometimes he reads aloud to me, which is okay; his calm, often theatrical reading is a relief after the ranting of the preceding hours.

In this manner we get through the day and the night. And in the morning, I enjoy a new bowl of crunchy breakfast full of vitamins and minerals, and drink my delicious fresh water from the well, and he sits back in his easy chair with a cup of coffee as wonderful music, Bach or Beethoven or Mozart comes from somewhere in the house. And once again, there is peace in the valley.

Excerpted from Diary of a Madman’s Cat © 2022 by Stoned Cat Press.

Back to the front page