• A ride in the car with a cat turns into a spectacle.
Image: FILE
I have been toying with the idea of doing a series of humorous articles on life troubles. By life troubles, I don’t mean serious troubles, like your wife stabbing you in the nuts with scissors. What I have in mind for funny life trouble stories is… well, read for yourself.
One day, a stray cat started dropping by in our backyard and then moved in permanently.
Nobody in the household really minded this cat being around. It was a pretty thing. But this cat was female and not neutered. Meaning kittens happened. It dropped eight kittens and as cute as they all were, keeping nine cats in our backyard was not an option. I had to find somewhere to place them. And so I called the Kenya Society for the Protection & Care of Animals (KSPCA), and the kind people there told me I could drop the cats off at their offices.
On cat drop-off day, I took two cardboard boxes, punched breathing holes in each and put momma cat in one box and the kittens in the other. I sealed the boxes with duct tape and loaded the boxes in the station wagon.
It didn’t occur to me to use a cat carrier instead of a cardboard box. I also was not aware that cats hate car rides. They get, I quickly learned, anxious, frantic, and frenzied. From the moment we started moving, momma cat started yowling and tearing at the cardboard box.
The holes I’d made for ease of breathing were also making it easy for that momma cat to tear through its box. I was on the highway, couldn’t stop. Only thing I could do was close my car window and drive agitated, while checking the rear-view mirror, looking for the inevitable emergence of the cat, free from its box.
And free itself it did, bursting out of the box and heading to what looked to it like an exit – the windscreen. Now unable to comprehend why it couldn’t get out, and still yowling, this cat started scampering back and forth across the dashboard. I’m still driving through all this, and freaking out. No way was I going to make it across town with a panicked, unpredictable cat leaping about on the dashboard. I had to think fast.
So I stopped at a petrol station figuring they must have cardboard boxes. They did. They gave me a box, no questions asked. Either they didn’t want to know why there was a cat running berserk on my dashboard, or they knew more about cats and car rides than I had before I started this trip.
The new box was sturdier and I made one tiny breathing hole a paw couldn’t fit through. Right there at the petrol station, I somehow managed to wrangle momma cat into the box and duct-taped the thing (the box, not the cat). Upon which I drove on to my destination without further incident, where I delivered the cat and its kittens.
Every time I think about that incident, I smile in amusement. My friends, when I told them, doubled over and laughed, tears and everything.
You see, with so much crap coming at us from all directions in life, it’s healthy to find the funny in everything and from anywhere.
A good laugh heals a lot of hurts – Madeleine L’Engle