Mock - Si! - Ing! Si! Bird - Si!

Those hateful mockingbirds are back. Although we can’t locate their nest, there has to be one, because that can be the only explanation for their territorial, aggressive behavior. Billy and Spoon cannot even go into the backyard to poo in peace. One chased Spoon all the way up the back stairs landing, swooping and screeching like some tiny pterodactyl. Flying by the window one of them spied the dogs in the office, and now it will sit on the ledge screeching threats until I charge the window and it flies away.

I wish I had my mom’s cat, Ginger. Ginger is a solid black stray who showed up rather eerily the day after our other black cat, Slinky, also a stray, died. Slinky expired of old age on the oriental carpet of the living room while my mom was in the process of selling her house. The real estate agent was touring some very promising prospective buyers and when they entered the living room they all practically tripped over his body, which blended in nicely with the carpet. Rigor had set in and his four legs were sticking stiffly out like a tipped over piñata. The wife screamed and burst into tears. The couple must have decided that if having a black cat cross over your path was bad luck, tripping over a dead one in your potential living room was even worse, so they passed on the house. Ginger, through some underground network of cats, heard there was an opening and appeared at the door, and was taken in because everyone was in mourning and sentimental and Ginger looked just like Slinky. Ginger, although extremely loving to humans, was quite the stealthy, bordering on psychopathic, hunter. My parents lived in front of a wooded levee teeming with rats and field mice. He liked to stun them and drag them unconscious into my mom’s dressing room, an enclosed space with no avenue for escape that he used as his own personal torture chamber. He would lie there waiting for the hapless creature to come to and then would toy with them like some serial killer for hours. When he tired of his little Jeffrey Dahmer games he would eat the body and then thoughtfully leave the head for my mom on her pillow.

I read that cats were originally domesticated to guard granaries. They were selectively bred for their hunting and killing prowess, so soon that instinct became removed from any tie to hunger. Cats became remorseless killers who killed for the pleasure of it. Wild bird enthusiasts despise them because of the millions of birds they kill each year. In any case, we could never have a cat because Billy and Spoon are their sworn enemy. We have to spell out the word, otherwise Billy and Spoon will start on a screaming, barking jag and run into the back yard looking for the stray who sometimes walks along the top of the fence. How they learned the word I don’t know.