Who you gonna call?
As I was driving to work this morning, navigating the occasional snowbank that has spilled into the road and car stopping short to whip into the Dunkin’ Donuts drive thru I saw what is becoming more and more of a frequent occurrence for me…glancing in my rear view mirror to
swerve around the aforementioned drive thru denizen, I caught in the rays of the morning sunshine yet another white hair along my left temple.
Every week for the past two months I’ve plucked out about 1-2 white hairs from this same little tuft, a true sign of the aging process that I am never goiing to win against. Before anyone even begins to tell me, yes, I am aware that for each hair you pick out three more grow back. It doesn’t stop me from attempting to turn back the clocks on this one. Still, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’ll probably look like an extra on the Nightmare on Elm St set within the next year.
This whole growing up process doesn’t seem to have any process at all. Less than 8 hours after the horrible “white hair sighting” of this morning I had to call my Daddy for advice on how to handle a “situation” at my townhouse. My sister and I were watching Bones (a frequent of our nights after the gym) and she went to run down to the basement to change over her laundry. Suddenly, she came tearing thru the kitchen into the living room.
“There is a f*(&ing cat on our basement stairs” she managed to eek out between terrified gasps.
All I could respond with was “What?”
“There is a cat curled up and sleeping on our basement stairs!”
“Well, what do you want me to do about it?”
“I don’t know! I’m just…there’s a f*(&ing cat on our basement stairs.”
“Again, what do you want me to do? And why are you freaking out…do you think it’s gonna come up here and start singing Memory with us?”
I can write a detailed business plan for multiple start-ups in my industry. I can run a board meeting of one of the largest teenage mentoring programs in Maine. I can call businesses and organizations across the state soliciting sponsorships for a women’s organization I’m a part of. I can bring home the bacon AND fry it up in a pan.
When it comes to a cat curled up on the basement stairs of my townhouse I am like a nine year old learning to multiply fractions all over again. Thus the call to my Dad. To ask a man who is 25 minutes away and arthritic to help me take care of what I have now made in my mind to be a now rabid and feral monster.
The hardest part of the drama of the evening? Once I took the time to talk out the story of basement cat, and figured out there’s no way my air and water tight basement would now become cat loose, I realized that he must have come from my adjoining unit. Running across the porch to knock on their door confirmed this suspicion and Sassy is now a dual basement cat between our two units.
How is it that you can be staring into the mirror growing old in the morning and calling your Daddy about Basement Cat in the evening?
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