What's the World Coming To?

There is no escaping the affection of Slappy White.

Why doesn't anything I've ever written about my damn cat show up in Googlisms? I type in "Slappy White" and get the exact same results I got four years ago. Frankly, I don't think they're even trying.

Slappy is, though. I sit down at the kitchen table, and he comes up and jumps in my lap. Never mind that I'm crossing my legs and sticking out my feet and holding my hands palms-out in front of me and shouting, "No, Slappy, no, no, no!" He just jockeys for position, eyeing my outstretched hands to gauge his leap. Within moments he's curled up on my lap, purring loudly, bestowing his baleful yellow gaze, occasionally reaching out a paw to pull my hand down to his head and pet him. The paw has pointy bits sticking out. Slappy White is not screwing around.

Go on, check back in a year. I guarantee that sentence won't be there.

Small children are no better. Well, Anna is, if you don't mind the fact that you have to dress her and get breakfast into her and transport her to her second-grade classroom while she is still technically fast asleep. But she's a good-natured enough kid, and quite easygoing, as long as she gets her way. Aren't we all?

A coworker of mine told me a story this morning about how he took his six-year-old daughter shoe-shopping over the weekend. About the 58th pair of shoes, he said, he was starting to get a bit tired. "Can't we just get these?" he asked her. "These are cute."

She looked at him, my coworker's little six-year-old cherub. "Daddy," she said evenly. "Why don't you just hit me with a stick?"

Anna is particular about footwear too, though not at the store. No, she'll let you buy the shoes, she just refuses to wear them once they've been bought and paid for. This might be worse.

But she's learned her lesson, I think. Last week we were dancing to Stereolab in the as-yet-uncleaned living room. (They are of course an English band, fronted by a French lead singer.) Anna was showing me how she's learned to do an Irish jig, but she tripped and hurt her foot on her Dora the Explorer doll, which had been left lying on el piso. If that doesn't teach you not to go barefoot around the house, at least it demonstrates the perils of multiculturalism.

But those are nothing to the perils of Slappy White's unquenchable cat breath. Slappy White is muy malodoroso!

Bet you a new pair of shoes it'll never show up there.