I was chatting on line with a friend recently and the subject got around to cats…well, her cats since I’ve become so allergic to them that I can’t have one anymore. In particular, she commented that she had to go “scoop the litter box,” because, with three cats sharing, it was a regular…if whiffy…chore.
Back in my Momcat days, I had several little purry furballs and one of them didn’t like sharing the box. I tried additional litter boxes, but since I couldn't keep the other cats out of the extra boxes, she still went around full of wounded dignity, her dainty little nose in the air. Fortunately she was an indoor-outdoor cat and would willingly go outside to do her kitty business, but rainy days and late night nature calls continued to be a problem for her.
We called her MamaKitty because she surprised us with a litter of kittens when she was little more than a kitten herself. We had found her, scrawny and flea-ridden, under a dumpster and brought her home. One vet visit and flea dip later, she was a member of the household. Being a feral kitten, she was not the friendliest cat in the world, but she did occasionally permit herself to be petted. Cats can be very aloof, but MamaKitty took it to a whole new level: I was her favourite person in the world, and she barely tolerated me! When she weaned her kittens we had her spayed, but the name MamaKitty had taken hold and so she was known for the rest of her days.
She was also aloof from the other cats…when she wasn’t being actively hostile to them. I got a little blue point Himalayan kitten, a male, and MamaKitty was so affronted by his presence that she took to stalking him like prey! It was so bad that we had to lock him in my bedroom while we were at work to prevent any mayhem. The cat ended up being called KittyMouse (although his registered name was Maserati) because MamaKitty treated him like a mouse, continually stalking and pouncing on him!
We had a large two story house, a split level type, with one bathroom on each level. The women in the house were outnumbered by the males, and getting those guys to put the lid down after a visit to the loo was a never-ending source of frustration. At one point I had to start reminding them to flush when they were done: finding the lid up is one thing…finding it up and unflushed is just gross. Naturally, nobody owned up to the transgression, so all three of them had to endure the brunt of my displeasure.
As I said, it was a big house…five bedrooms, to be exact. Downstairs there was a laundry next to a small bedroom that contained the hot water heater and furnace in a cupboard near the door. I had furnished this room as a home office, often spending time there late at night when the rest of the house had finally calmed down and gone quiet. Ordinarily all the lights were off in the house except for the one in the office, and with the exception of “house noises,” it was deadly quiet. One night I was typing along, my mind occupied with the story I was spinning, when I distinctly heard trickling noises nearby. I stopped typing and listened intently…yes, there really was a trickling noise.
Slowly, I turned my head trying to get a bead on the sound. Was it the hot water heater in the cupboard? Had someone turned on the hose outside and I was hearing water in the flowerbed under the window? Slowly I rotated the desk chair, concentrating on what I was hearing, until the sound was at its loudest. I looked around and something outside the office door caught my eye.
Across the hall from this room was the downstairs bathroom. It was dark in both the hallway and the bathroom, but I could clearly see two small red orbs hovering about two feet above the floor. My stomach suddenly turned to liquid and gooseflesh broke out all over me. My god, what was that?
The hairs lifted on the back of my neck as the red orbs wavered slightly from one side to the other, blinked out momentarily, and then reappeared. I flicked my eyes right and left, but I had no escape route: this room was at the end of the hallway and to get out, I would have to get within a yard of whatever it was that was hovering in my bathroom. Just as it occurred to me to pick up the phone and call someone…I had no idea who…to come rescue me, the orbs dropped audibly to just a few inches above the floor and started moving towards me. As they entered the light spilling out the office door and into the hall, I was able to see that my mysterious visitor was none other than MamaKitty! The red orbs were merely her retinas reflecting the light from my office!
But what about that trickling sound?
I went into the bathroom and flipped on the light and there was my answer. That cat had somehow associated the toilet with certain body functions and there, floating in the water, was proof. The trickling sound I had heard was MamaKitty taking a wee in the toilet! It should have occurred to me that there was no toilet paper in toilet with the mysterious deposits…but then who expects the non-flushing culprit to be a cat?
The next day I apologized to the kids, explaining it was the cat’s fault, not theirs, Without exception, they looked at me as if I had completely lost my mind. One of them asked me, only half-facetiously, if I had be smoking “those funny cigarettes.” I tried to explain it to them, but everyone just dismissed it, including my (then) husband who was sure I was a few bricks shy of a load anyway.
So it became my and MamaKitty’s secret. If I found the lid down, I’d put it up for her and if I found kitty exhaust deposits in the loo, I’d flush them down. It was just the two of us, knowing what the clever little cat had taught herself.
Then one Sunday morning, my husband staggered his bleary-eyed naked self into the bathroom, only to return seconds later, wide-eyed and rigid with disbelief.
“Holy sh!t!” he exclaimed. “You’ll never believe what I saw!”
I looked up from my romance novel and quirked my eyebrows questioningly. MamaKitty was a creature of habit…I already knew…
“The cat! The cat is sitting on the toilet!”
I nodded and went back to my book.
“No,” he said urgently. “The cat is on the toilet!”
“Yes,” I told him. “She prefers this one. If you don’t want to wait, you’ll have to go downstairs…”
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Close Encounters of the Kitty-Cat Kind
Sunday, November 25, 2007
...into the fire
I have to admit I was a bit reluctant. I’m not ordinarily inclined favourably towards long stretches of road that don’t have regular rest stops or petrol stations with ultra-clean bathrooms. Like most women, if I am to drop my drawers and expose my delicate bits to strange porcelain, I have a very strong preference for that porcelain…and its surroundings…to be immaculately clean. But Hubby was keen on taking a new route and after seeing the myriad of little towns…most of them no more than 50 to 75 km apart…I agreed to his plan.
So, we had our breakfast and hit the road. After filling Bertha and making sure our padkos and cool drink keepers were full up, we got out onto the N2 headed towards Port Shepstone. At Sheppy, we turned north towards Kokstad, a town I have never seen and Hubby hasn’t been to in 25 years. The adventure was on.
I must say, it was a learning experience.
The first thing I learned is that making the assumption that all those little towns would have petrol stations was a grievous error. The second thing I learned is that it was also a mistake to assume that a major brand petrol station…like Shell or CalTex…would have clean restrooms. My third lesson was that pay toilets actually exist in South Africa…I have never seen one before in this country and today I saw three! And finally, I learned that, as bad as the road conditions at Harrismith were (and they were really, really bad), those conditions were not as bad as they could have been.
I quickly discovered that on a road trip, I get very thirsty. Probably the drying effects of the air conditioning in the car (it also gives my hair static electricity, to Hubby’s never-ending amusement and my everlasting annoyance). So, we keep a cooler box of iced drinks in the back seat where I can easily reach it. We pack it full of Sprite Zero and Coke Lite and guzzle our way across country.
En route to Durbs we stopped at Ultra Cities and Star Stops and whatever Engen calls their mega petrol stations whenever Bertha started looking thirsty, when it was meal time (diabetics have to eat regular meals, even on the road), or when one of us needed to find a loo. On the N1, N5, and N3, that was just not difficult. On the R56 and R58, it was virtually impossible!
Because we were unsure of petrol availability along the way, we stopped for fuel when the gauge hit the halfway mark or lower (depending on where we could find a station). At Kokstad we filled up the car and emptied both of us out and got on the road to parts unknown…at least to us…confident that we would encounter multiple petrol stations along the way…doesn’t every rural town have at least a one pumper? Those farmers have to fuel up their cars and trucks, too, after all. Every thing was fine until all that Coke Lite I drank decided it needed an exit. Unlike Hubby, who can pull off to the side of the road and make an acquaintance with a local bush or tree, I require technology for such an event, so I said “Pull in at the next station you see, I need a loo.” He nodded while I consulted the map…maybe 20 km to the next town, so not to worry.
Yeah, right. The next town consisted of several hillsides full of rondawels, a bottle store and a tavern. As did the next…and the next…and the next! A hundred kilometres down the road and there’s no petrol, no loo…and no bush big enough to hide my glowing white moons! We did wend our way through one scabrous town…Mt. Fletcher, I think…but the Engen station (the only one in town) was so filthy and dilapidated I was unwilling to risk it. Dirty is one thing…dirty toilets are something else again.
But I’m experienced and I’m stoic. I know if I adjust my posture just right I’ll put a minimum of pressure on my bladder and I can wait it out. “Just take it easy on the bumps,” I told Hubby. “There’s got to be a place ahead with a relatively clean loo.” And Hubby, bless his empathetic little heart, tried to avoid the potholes and go gently over the unintended speed bumps, and on the map I saw another town just a few kilometres away. Hope was born anew.
We came around a bend in the road and saw a flagman waving us off to the left, off the road. Ahead, on the right, stretched a beautiful ribbon of newly tarred highway, inaccessible. Instead, we bumped off onto an unpaved track reminiscent of Harrismith…and it went on forever! The next time some smart-mouth bunny hugger superciliously finds fault with my choice of an SUV for my personal vehicle, I’m going to whip out the pictures of this abomination that passes for a road and ask if she would like to drive a Prius or some other trendy little pseudo-car over it. It damn near killed Bertha, an SUV built on an honest-to-god truck chassis by none other than Mercedes Benz. I’m sorry, but if my ML, sturdy road warrior that she is, can be brought to a shuddering, beeping, squealing halt by this piece of road, exactly what kind of namby-pamby town car would do better?
The ruts and bumps and rocks and holes were so bad that at times we were literally airborne. On one of those leaps, when we came down, Hubby’s left foot (which had also been airborne) came down on the parking brake pedal. This car is engineered such that, when you try to set the parking brake while your foot is on the accelerator and the car is moving forward, it will emits a series of shrieking beeps and, if the offence is sufficiently egregious, it will simply shut itself off. Which is exactly what happened. Except that we didn’t know what happened at the time. All we knew was that the car was dead, we were somewhere in the middle of the Transkei on a road that would have done a 4x4 challenge proud, and I had to pee so bad my eyes were turning yellow. I started scanning for a likely bush, but there was nothing but rocks…too big to drive over easily, but far too small to conceal anything like my overly-generous backside.
Hubby quickly figured out what was causing the lack of forward motion, restarted the car, and put us back on the trail. Fortunately, we were nearly back on the tarred road…I am sure my bladder would not have taken much more abuse, and within a few minutes we were in a small town that actually had two petrol stations! We pulled in to the first station, only to be told they didn’t have a loo, but the gents at the CalTex cheerfully pointed us around the corner.
They neglected to tell us it was a pay toilet…and why was only the women’s toilet fitted with a coin operated lock?? It took Hubby a full two minutes to get the stupid thing to accept the damn R1 coin (I couldn’t figure it out…I’ve never seen a coin op box like it in my life!) and let me in.
OK…it was clean. But there were three stalls, two of which lacked paper, and the third lacked a functioning lock. By this time, I did not care. I grabbed a wad of tissue and took it with me to a stall I could lock and found heavenly relief.
After stopping to get lunch at the hot food counter at the local Spar (not a restaurant, fast food joint or takeaway in town), we hit the road again, headed inexorably towards Colesberg where I sit typing this.
Looking back on today’s experience, I have come to the conclusion that, between Port Shepstone and Colesburg there are a total of three clean public restrooms: one in Kokstad, one in Maclear, and another in Lady Grey. That’s it. So, unless you have an iron bladder, I strongly suggest that if you are driving from Durban to Bloemfontein or points west, brave the construction debacle at Harrismith…the alternate route not only had worse roads, it had no toilets!
