Monday, May 12, 2014

Not a Bad Monday

Monday's get a bad rap...and deservedly so. It isn't Monday's fault, it's just the way things were set up. For us, it's the first day of the work week after having a much too short weekend to frolic and play and visit et al. We wonder, as we roll out of bed and lie prostrate on the floor for maybe two more minutes of blissful sleep, why the weekends can't be five days and the work week two? Nevertheless, that isn't the world we live in. So, why bother contemplating it?

I get up this morning at four, as I always do. It isn't that I have to, it's just I can't lay in bed anymore like I did when I was a kid. The old hip bones and knee bones and back bones and shoulder bones....well, you get the picture. They all hurt after about three hours. Naturally, the first thing I do is pretty much the first thing that all octogenarians do when they get up. I walk to the entrance of the bathroom and switch on the light. It turned out to be a good move.

Sasha is our elder cat statesman. He's sixteen and a half years old. Depending on what web site you look at, he's somewhere between eighty-four and eighty-six equivalent years old in human terms. He doesn't hear too good these days, and has gone to sod. He sleeps constantly in this one chair...at the dining table. We feel he's earned the privilege and, after all, he was Lulu's cat. He can do no wrong. Sasha doesn't get in a hurry about anything. He's slow to walk and has a hitch in his giddy-up where his hips are concerned. He's stopped bedding us down at night because it's too hard to jump up on the bed. We put a step-up at the end of it for him, but eventually even that was too much to ask.

The reason it was a good move to turn on the light is because our bathroom is where the litter box is. That's another thing about ancient cats that have been spoiled to their own mental oblivion. They lose their desire to put out too much energy. Sasha doesn't go 'IN' the litter box anymore. He feels as if he's done his catly duty if he just gets close.

Facing the bathroom, the lavatory is to my right. The litter box is to my left. The trail to the toilet is in between and it isn't that wide. With eyelids only a quarter of the way open and my mind still fuzzy and trying to deal with reality and the fact that only a few minutes earlier I was making love to Raquel Welch from One Million B.C., I notice that in order for me to reach the toilet, I have to traverse a cat turd mine field.

Sasha has deposited at least eight cat turds in my path, and it seemed to my blurred vision that they were placed in what soldiers say in military terms a 'spread pattern', which is used to great effect when targeting enemy forces. You see, when dogs crap...they just hunch over and lay a pile. Rarely do they walk around in serpentine fashion with a turd 'plop-plop' machine at their backside, leaving little blobs of day-wrecking death behind them. But, with Sasha? Oh yeah, he doesn't give a damn anymore. In his little pea brain, he's thinking we should be glad he even makes the effort at his age.

My first thought was to try to make it without having to face the disgusting task of picking it all up. I would then use the bathroom, make my escape, turn off the light, and leave my wife to clean it up. I'm not sure who it was...maybe God...but someone slapped me against the back of my head and I heard a voice. It said, "What has she done to you? Pick that up before I shove it up your bee-hind." I was suddenly flushed with guilt for even having the thought. It didn't take long and I was able to keep from being infected by touching any of it. After that, I went about my morning routine without another hitch.

The reason I said it wasn't a bad Monday is because that was the only thing 'bad' that happened to me today. I will testify in court that no one on the road pissed me off, going to and from work. At the job, not one person irritated me, tried to get over on me, blamed me for anything, got on to me about being behind on something or not being somewhere they thought I should have been....AND NOT SAYING ALL OF THAT HAPPENS....and we had no emergencies with the manufacturing processes of our equipment. There were no nasty e-mails, no tense meetings, no in-fighting no politics....I mean to tell you that nothing else went wrong today. Nothing. I know, I know...Monday isn't over yet.

But if midnight rings...and all that went wrong today was I had to help an old cat who used to belong to my deceased daughter...and who is an animal I love as much as a human being? You know what? It wasn't a bad Monday. Not by a long shot.