Small talk, cat talk
OK, guys, I’m thinking it best we immediately just hit the ground running with this holiday column — my final of the year here — and kick things off with a stalwart sample listing of a few desperately-needed, stalled-out air fillers that you must commit to memory for whenever you find yourselves trapped at that most horrific of holiday Hindenburgs — the dead New Year’s Eve party going down in flames.
Holiday party small talk is, after all, inescapable; everybody alive during holiday season invariably parrots a riff on exactly these same life-support bromides, over and over: “Wow! How is it nearly 2024, already? It’s like, POOF! 2023 disappeared in an instant! The seasons just seem to blur by, faster and faster, every passing year! How is it that the older I get, the younger everybody else looks?”
Nobody gives a damn that you’re just spouting a stream of sophomoric clichés. Nobody’s listening to your words. All that they’re hearing is empty air being refreshed. You’re at least putting forth something into the oxygen-less silence.
So my merry revelers, time now we turn to whether a similar stockpile of reindeer-reeking platitudes is necessary for those mirthless Christmas gatherings, when finding ourselves stranded for hours on hideous end at Grandma’s house, infested with relatives you haven’t given so much as even a single thought to since, well, last year this very same time?
A mere 10 minutes in, and already you’re white-knuckling it. Every year, you discover yourself whittling down the number of your own blood relations you can tolerate being in the same room with for five minutes, resisting the urge to spit into their iced tea or cum in their coffee. Ever redundant to the last, their lives turned out not one bit different than anybody ever expected they would from the get go, with many of them sinking even further and faster, than in your wildest dreams.
Those whom you knew in your gut would eventually revert to white trash — probably sooner rather than later — have already made real headway; others you once thought destined to turn into meth-heads didn’t surprise, either; those whom you instinctively knew would croak young fantastically pulled off their dates with destiny. Meanwhile, hiding in plain sight, sparkling shiny as diamonds from a coal pit, there gradually metamorphosed a rarified one or two relations whom, against all odds, somehow unicorned escape velocity into loftier atmospheres. And every December, because they dreamed too big for their britches and won, their familial reward comes in the form of getting to play ATM, upon command, to the sorry lot of the rest of them.
Whatcha say, guys, we lighten things up a bit here on out. Slip into a little holiday spirit — a warm mug of cocoa in our lap, our favorite ugly Christmas sweater bearing another snapped jingle-bell ball — and just get all romping cats donning their jingly hats right to it, shall we?
Ah, Christmas in the Sky Ark! I’ve noticed, sweet readers, that the holiday season always brings about an unusual uptick of inquiries from you about, of all topics, my cats. I’m always touched, if a bit mystified, as to how very knowledgeable y’all are of my two felines. Recently, one of you even reminded me that it was in mid-December, three years ago, when Miss Pineapple first merrily entered my and my husband’s lives, although he’s never home long enough for Miss Pineapple to ever quite grasp his placement within the hierarchy.
Miss Pineapple was 5, supposedly, when I adopted her from the SPCA (the best $37 I ever spent in my life). Roo’s older brother, Boo, had recently died, at 19, of old age. Roo was inconsolable. He needed another companion. Miss Pineapple was who walked over to me first.
“Girl,” I assured her, “you just hit jackpot. Let’s go home.” Outside the door, I opened her carrier for her to enter her new home on her own. She got one foot over the threshold, and an elated Roo dashed over to kiss her. Joy has reigned ever since: The Sky Ark requires no getting used to; one takes to it immediately.
FYI, Roo himself just turned 18 this month. He’s never outgrown kitten. He forever looks and acts about 18 months. Sleek, shiny as an ocelot, Roo loves playing fetch more than a puppy. Gracelessly, he chases butterflies atop the balcony railing — 16 floors above earth — and can hear the pop of a tinned Fancy Feast lid from 50 meters away. Roo would be perfectly happy living in a dumpster, so long as he got enough food to eat.
Roo experienced true hunger prior to my rescue of him from a cage in a pet food store. Memory of starvation never leaves any being. Roo had been discovered in an abandoned apartment building living off spider eggs. Furless, diseased and stone-deaf, the poor creature was living on borrowed time. Three more hours of it, to be exact. “We can only keep ’em for a month,” explained the manager. “He’s been sweet, but no takers. Just look at him. Closing time tonight marks his day 31.”
I suspect Roo’s always known just how razor-thin was the margin by which he escaped the Reaper. Today, in Roo World, the glass is always half-full and the skies always sunny. And on this note, let’s just go for holiday broke and wish a happy, early birthday to Willow Biden, too. The new White House cat shall be turning the ripe old age of 4 at the beginning of 2024. Willow, flaunting green eyes with gray and white stripes, bears an uncanny resemblance to our Miss Pineapple, but whereas Willow is an American tabby domestic short-hair, her doppelganger down here in Dallas is a British-Blue Tortoiseshell — genetic wildcards as mirror images. Now how 2024 election year is that?
— Howard Lewis Russell
Merry Christmas to you all, my dear readers, and to any of you who may already be questioning your New Year’s resolutions, well, you all know who can salve even the pain out of January: AskHoward@dallasvoice.com.
