Long before Frankencat was a glimmer in my eye, Pha did something so extraordinary that I still wonder if it really happened. It was shortly after we became roommates and I was not yet accustomed to her rather unique abilities.
This is not my Murphy bed. Click the image to see more images of Murphy beds and read more about them.
I live in a small studio apartment with a Murphy bed, so called because because William Lawrence Murphy first patented them in 1916. Anyway, you know the kind: it folds up into the wall when not in use and is usually held in place by a cheap latching device such as you would find on an old screen window or door.
My latching device had been broken since the day I moved in, but rather than fix it properly, I just wedged the comforter and pillows tight around the edges and figured that was good enough. It had always worked and seemed sturdy enough against everything except a tornado.
On this particular morning I was standing in my galley sized kitchen kinda of chewing Pha out because she is such a fussy eater and had yet again turned her nose up at some expensive canned cat food I buy her now and then as a treat. This had been one of those times and I was trying to impress on her that it was special cat food, and that if she kept rejecting it I wasn’t going to buy it anymore. (I’ve since learned that anything in “classic pate form” is like Brussels sprouts to her.) Still, I was talking to myself more than anything when I heard this low growl. I looked over from the kitchen sink and saw that Pha was sitting on the heater below the front windows, kinda crouched down and staring right at me.
We hadn’t been together more than a few weeks, but in all that time she had never once looked at me cross-eyed, let alone growl or make any aggressive sound toward anything. I was more than a little shocked.
I said, “Pha, what are you doing?”
She increased the volume of her growl and actually raised her hackles. I turned back around to the kitchen sink to see if a mouse or bird or even a rat had somehow crawled onto the counter while I had been preoccupied with her lack of interest in pate. Nothing. So I turned the water off, dried my hands and said, “Now listen, Pha,” as I stepped away from the sink. As I stepped into that part of the room she arched her back and her growls intensified into a cat-fight like yowl. More stunned than ever I sank into my easy chair to just watch her for awhile. I wanted to know if I’d brought a schizoid cat home to live with me.
It didn’t take long to find out. No sooner had I settled into my chair than I heard a soft “click”, like the sound a screen door makes when it latches. I looked over, and faster than I could get up and moving on a good day, down came the bed, gaining speed with all that thick wooden framing.
It hit the coffee table with a huge crash, splitting my nice Aladdin’s oil lamp in two and spilling paraffin oil all over the place, as well as scattering books and magazines everywhere. I’m really surprised that the table legs held up.
I put the bed back up, wedging it extra tight, mopped up the oil and debris as best I could, and then went looking for Pha. I never saw her vanish in all the confusion, but there she was in her favorite hiding place: under my recliner. Honestly, I don’t know how she gets in or out, but she can even do it when I’m sitting in it, which is a good and sturdy talent the way I come crashing into the chair sometimes.
So I got her out (you have to tilt the entire seat forward off the ground to get at her), but she oddly came right to me and we just sat and cuddled and rocked for a good long while. Finally, she pushed her front feet into my chest and lifted her face off my neck and held it back, regarding me for a moment, just like any loved one would do before saying “You scared me to death! I TOLD you that bed was going to fall and you STILL almost walked right under it!”
I’m tellin’ ya, between the weird growling and the perfectly clear but loving scolding she had just given me I got all teary, and it was more than a few minutes before I let her go.
No point in adding, I suppose, that there’s a strong new latch on the bed and a cupboard shelf with half a dozen cans of Friskies on it, non-pate, of course.
Woodpecker
Woodpecker Writes 