I\u2019m putting this out here now, well in advance of the actual event, so you will know what really happened when you read in my obituary that I had a dizzy spell, fell down the stairs and broke my neck. It won\u2019t be the truth. It\u2019s the cat that killed me, not a dizzy spell.<\/p>\n
It won\u2019t have been a malicious act. It\u2019s just a cat doing what cats do. They like to follow old coots around and toy with them, the same way they taunt and tease a mouse. If you get up from your chair to walk out of a room, a cat will wake from a sound sleep, rush ahead, dive to the floor and roll over on its back. Directly in line with your next footstep! <\/p>\n
That\u2019s okay, when the room is well lit and you\u2019re paying attention to where you\u2019re going. You can spot the cat and step over it, avoiding a hip-breaking tumble to the floor. But, if the room is poorly lit or if you are reading the paper as you walk, like old coots often do, you\u2019re in for a long hospital stay. If the cat gets you on the stairs, you\u2019re done for. I\u2019m forced to walk around the house without picking up my feet; it\u2019s the only way to avoid injury or death. It\u2019s why old coots shuffle along, barely lifting their feet. Cats make us walk like that, not old age. <\/p>\n
Our cat, Rosie, named after the great (and now, late) blues singer, Roosevelt Dean, has a nasty habit of climbing up on the bulletin board in my office and pulling out a pushpin. He bats it around for a while and then leaves it in a strategic spot for someone in bare feet to step on. When it happens to me, I perform an acrobatic leap that more often than not, leaves me limping. Sometimes he burrows under a throw rug to hide and leaves a big hump in the middle. The last time he \u201cgot\u201d me, I did a back flip, one that would have most certainly earned a perfect \u201c10\u201d in an Olympic competition.<\/p>\n
Our cat has lion DNA. He lurks behind things and leaps up as I pass by, getting my heart beating so fast I have to sit down. He refuses to drink water from a bowl, insisting on fresh water from the tap. This works fine when I remember to turn off the faucet. I\u2019ve flooded the laundry room more than once when I was distracted and forgot the water was on. <\/p>\n
There is an angry debate raging across the country on how to lower the cost of health care. It\u2019s too complicated for me to know what should be done, but one thing that would significantly reduce the strain on the system is to cat proof the homes of old coots. It would save millions in the repair and rehabilitation of broken hips, wrists, elbows, shoulders and skulls. Of course, it might help if we paid attention to where we were walking instead of trying to remember why we are going there. <\/p>\n
This column was originally published in 2009. A good friend of ours, and Roosevelt, recently adopted him, reserving visitation privileges for us. It was a hard decision, but since we are away from home for sizable portions of the year, it was the only one we could make. Rosie never did end up breaking my neck, just my heart.<\/i><\/p>\n