Warthog kisses and hateful cats.
There was room for both at Bob's.
I don’t know this cat, and I think I’ll keep it that way.
A new selection from the memoir project below…
In elementary school, we lived on 11th Avenue in a neighborhood called Porter Creek. We rented a split-level house with wall-to-wall, brown, and orange carpet in the entryway. The house was rented out to us by a missionary family who moved to Kenya. Bob, the family patriarch, was a very smiley man who loved to hunt. In fact, instead of a fancy walk-in closet or a spa tub, a door off the master bedroom opened up into what we called “the headroom”. A drafty, windowless room full of the mounted, stuffed heads of animals Bob had shot while on safaris in Africa and somehow shipped back to the Yukon. There was a wildebeest, a few antelope-adjacent animals and even a massive water buffalo noggin.
It’s hard to work out these economics. We could barely scrape money together for a couple of Big Macs and Bob was sailing dead animals across the seven seas and up the Alaska Highway on a missionary’s budget. He treasured those taxidermy critters, and part of renting the house was leaving that room as is. One of our favorite games was to turn the lights out in there and see how long a kid could handle being alone, groping around in the dark for the light switch, finding themselves instead with a fistful of scruff, staring into the disinterested glass eyes of a wildebeest.
I remember the first time my paternal grandparents, Harold and Beth, came to visit us while we lived in that house. My grandma never really approved of our move away from Canada’s mildest climate to the Yukon. Yet they came one Christmas season anyway, which meant Grandma moaned about her freezing joints and Grandpa helped us build an igloo in the backyard. All of our previous igloo-building enterprises had comprised of scooping the center out of a snow dune to lay down in. But my grandpa had been an engineering major before he met Jesus and decided to take up his cross and follow; this was a solid structure, squares of snow stacked and melted together. We could sit in it comfortably, planning our next snowball assault on the neighbor kids.
There was nowhere comfortable in the house for my grandparents to sleep, so they bedded down on a mattress on the floor of the headroom. One morning, we woke to Grandpa’s barking laugh, and we begged him to regale us with his antics. He’d gotten up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and standing up in the pitch black, knocked a warthog’s block right off the wall. When Grandma stirred and asked him what was wrong, he lowered the foul beast’s snout to her mouth and crooned, “Give us a kiss, sweetie?” We roared with approval. It was better than any of the stunts we had pulled on each other.
The 11th Ave house strangely also came with a living animal; a Siamese cat with a penchant for pooping in the basement instead of his litter box. This tendency did not endear him to our mom. Our family actually liked cats. My dad is one of those rare men who prefers them over dogs and doesn’t talk about trying to run them over for sport.
This cat we inherited did not want to belong to four rambunctious kids and was accustomed to presiding over something impossible to come by in our house: quiet. Despite his obvious distaste for us, we kids aspirationally dubbed him “Prince Charming”. As for my mom, I only ever heard her call him, “that awful cat”. She was clear-eyed about this and the rest of us finally accepted the grim reality that no amount of fawning would make him love us. So, when he failed to show up again after wandering outside one day, we didn’t canvas the neighborhood looking for him.
Thanks for reading, friends.
Memoir?! We need to talk...