Mrs. Doolittle

My mom's cat Brutus Blogger has been missing for a week. Mom was over for dinner during which she discussed with us several theories that might explain his absence.

Me: He's probably just out exploring the woods or maybe he got hurt a little bit. He'll wander back, I'm sure.

Mom: No, he's too devoted to me. He's by my side every minute of every day. Nothing can keep him from me. He's dead. I know he is.

Julius: Brutus is dead??

Me: We don't know that, honey. Grandma is just concerned because he hasn't come home.

Mom: I'm sure something got him.

Rob: What could get him out there? A bobcat or what?

Mom: Well, a fox could get him. He's probably too small to pick him up completely in his mouth, but he'd pounce on him and grab him and then drag him across the ground between his legs into the woods.

Rob: Let's not go into such graphic detail in front of Julius.

Mom: He's a big boy, he can take it. It could have been a hawk.

Rob: A hawk could not pick that cat up.

Mom: We have some pretty big hawks out there. And sometimes they work in tandem. Three of them working as a team could probably get him.

Rob: Hawks working as a team?

Mom: They do that you know.

I think that was about the time Rob probably wandered off because it was getting a little bit weird.

The next day I was on the phone with Mom who mentioned the cat had wandered back home about 10:15PM. He came from the north, she said, as if that was somehow significant. He wasn't hurt, in fact he was quite fat and seemed happy she said.

We speculated on the following scenarios:

• He was vacationing at a neighbor's house, the big user.
• Someone found him and thought he was lost and kept him in their house. "People do that, you know, when they are trying to acclimate a cat to stay with them. It's recommended."
• He accidentally got locked in a shed or garage. "He's nosey. Of course, if that happened he'd probably be skinny. Unless there were a lot of mice in there."
• Someone locked him into their shed on purpose BECAUSE there were a lot of mice in there. "And then they could have let him out when he'd gotten them all."
• Julius suspected the cat has a new girlfriend and perhaps they went on vacation. He thinks they walked to New York City or perhaps Hollywood.

I could see we were getting pretty far afield, so I reined her in by telling her I was glad he was back. She seemed a little miffed that he might possibly be disloyal by vacationing with a neighbor.

She finished off her story by telling me about how they went down by the creek to work and found two baby deer there. She said they sat very still and watched the deer who didn't seem to mind being watched since they were babies and didn't know any better. She said another older deer came up and was eating nearby. The birds kept chattering at her as if to tell her there were humans nearby. Everytime the birds chattered the deer would look over in mom's direction. Finally they all ran off.

She said, "They have a communication system among themselves, these animals. It's a secret language where they warn each other about danger."

The fun thing about my mom is that she has an interesting perspective on the world around her. Although, it DOES concern me about how far these ideas and theories could eventually go. Today it's secret communication between birds and deer... what will it be tomorrow?

Maybe how Vicks Vaporub can cure cancer? (Oops, been there.) How zinc cures gray hair? (Covered it.) That the answer for every childhood disciplinary problem is the flyswatter? (Possibly covered more than once.) She has opinions on aliens, medicine, law, cooking, animals, child rearing, how to save money, and how the world is going to end.

What scares me more than some of her outlandish theories is that sometimes she's actually RIGHT.