The unknowable strangeness of cats

Cats. Of the many things I have learned about since I came to live here, the thing I have learned the most about and still understand the least is the cat.

I may have been a bit of a rube when I moved here. But now I can walk on a leash, sit and stay, do graceful u-turns and about-turns and come when I am called. Cats do not know any commands. They meander aimlessly through the day, stalking counters and refrigerator tops with impunity. They are willfully oblivious to commands of any sort.

The Encyclopedia of Dogs is divided by jobs and activities. Hunting dogs. Herding Dogs. But cats take no exercise and have little employment except a useless sort of make work that consists of sitting in the middle of the newspaper article their Person is reading, or crawling into unused cardboard boxes and sitting there for a very long time.

My communications are brief and to the point: the cheerful tail wag, the short bark of warning, the long bark of warning, and the growl of, well, warning. Plus the pant of laughter. Cat language is an unintelligible welter of mews, meows, mrows, growls, purrs, clicks, chatters, and snaky hisses.

One of the most confounding of their habits is their perpetual cleaning. Inside ears and between toes, tail tips and nose ends, they clean constantly. As a seasonal bather I understand the joy of a hard-earned patina of adventure. The grimy front paws from a good dig in the perennial garden or the sweet perfume of a roll in something past its prime can be enjoyed for a long time after the adventure itself has ended. Unless you are a cat and then you'll be too busy cleaning yourself to ever have an adventure.

Cats are pretty enough creatures and I do admire the way they can steal chairs while people are sitting on them, take over beds, sleep for up to 22 hours a day, get whatever they want by being haughty and sit staring at you from atop a door jam. But when it comes down to it, I just don't understand cats!