Certainly, I can forgive my friends for most, if not all, of their faults, such as leaving delicate-looking wads of Kleenex in highly visible places, or changing the screen saver in computer stores to a scrolling line of rather outrageous text. However, people, I must ask you this: Has anyone even heard of the Cat Who...?
Not in my world, they haven’t. I have...change that to had...one real-life acquaintance that was a devoted fan of the series. That acquaintance was a grade school art (art!) teacher, who has long since vanished from the scene, although she is reputed to display her paintings on the beach every Sunday. Insisting that Koko was overfed, she called me the name of "Yum Yum" by mistake...at least once.
After that, though, all was downhill. For the rest of the century I discovered few Cat Who... fans. A woman about 20 years older than myself declared to me "My father-in-law reads those books," with a more than visible smirk.
The most hilarious incidence must be The Cat Who Killed a Writer. When I brought up the subject of the Cat Who... a friend who happened to be nearby exclaimed, "I‘ve read one of those books."
"Which one?" I asked.
"I don’t know. It was something like The Cat Who Killed a Writer." She said with a little shrug. "I don’t remember any of it."
"Was it The Cat Who Could Read Backwards?" I asked. Don’t ask me why, but it was intuition.
"Yes, that’s it!" she said triumphantly. At which point I took great pains to explain to her that the cat does not kill people, and the writer she was referring to was a columnist. Rather ironic, since she was a columnist herself collaborating with me on a project (why would I write this if I didn’t have experience?).
"That’s strange," she said. "I read it many years ago. I remember picking up the book and looking at the cover. My first thought was, the cat killed the person?"
I never brought up the subject so casually again.
So it had been and so it is, that I and undoubtedly most of you live in a place where virtually no one has heard of the Cat Who.... That’s probably the very reason you’re visiting this web site.
We can only cope.
And write columns.
About the Author: Lynn L. lives somewhere near a beach (gave that away in the text), has (gasp) no cats and is a journalist. (Actually, I’m a high school yearbook journalist...did I sound that young to you?) She would love to be contacted but any hate mail or Spam will vanish into her Spam closet forever.
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