Fraidy Cat

I’ve read that if you surreptitiously place a cucumber or zucchini behind your cat, when the cat notices the vegetable, it will jump straight up in alarm (the cat, not the cucumber). I’ve never tested this out because I’ve also read that the cat thinks the cucumber is some kind of fat, short, immobile but threatening green snake and is genuinely terrified. Some people thought it was cruel to put a cat through this unexpected terror. (Though no one seems to care that the whole red dot thing puts a cat through unrelenting frustration. We think it’s funny, so that’s okay. Actually, the whole cucumber thing was supposed to be amusing, too. Go figure. But I digress.)

I’ve never tried the cucumber trick on any of our cats. They have enough things that they’re afraid of already.

Knowing that I’m a cat lover, my friends often give me cat-related gifts — cookie jars, Christmas ornaments, earrings, mugs, and so forth. One year, someone got me a pair of cat house slippers. They were very lifelike, a pair of puffy, furry, black-and-white cats with little pink noses. Basically, they were adorbz. (Yes, I know that “adorbz” is years old and probably as horse-and-buggy as “horse-and-buggy.” But I like it, so it stays. It’s not like a piece of slang that no one can figure out what it means without context (or maybe even with) like “rizz.” But I digress again.)

At any rate, the first time I walked down the hall wearing them, our cat Shaker (who was also black and white) saw the pair of mirror-image cats shuffling toward her, she turned tail and ran. (The same thing happened when Dan “walked” a 3 1/2-foot-tall plush rabbit down the hall. (Dan won the rabbit at a carnival. He had fun driving home from Pennsylvania with it. He strapped it in the passenger seat and enjoyed seeing children waving at it. It didn’t go with what we graciously call our “decor,” so we gave it to a friend with a young child. The child appreciated it, but the mother didn’t. Didn’t go with her decor either. But I digress some more. (Embedded. Are you impressed?)))

Another cat we had shared with most other cats a love of plastic bags. (We once met a cat in Dubrovnik who tried to climb into our souvenir bag and come home with us. But I digress even more.) Anyway, Jasper, who was a little skittish anyway, got tangled in a plastic grocery sack, which was enough to alarm him. What he didn’t realize, however, was that the bag contained a CD in its case (CD = a horse-and-buggy item). Startled, Jasper tried to get away from the thing by running upstairs. But the bag was caught on his leg and chased him, thump, thump, thump, all the way up. He couldn’t get away from it. Unlike a cucumber, it wasn’t stationary. Like a cucumber, it terrified him.

Our current cat, Toby, is afraid of water. No, not his water dish. Not rain. Not even the water in the shower (he likes to sit on the shower seat, though not while the water’s running). No, he’s afraid of bottled water. The fizzy kind, anyway. If I crack open a bottle and it makes the fizzy sound (which it always does), Toby does that cat thing where he levitates three feet off the ground like he’s spring-loaded. I don’t know, maybe fizzy water sounds like another cat hissing.

I suppose it’s wrong of me to laugh at the fraidy cats. They don’t laugh at me when I run screaming from bees and wasps. Or at least I don’t hear them. (Maybe they’re polite enough to snicker behind my back.)