I'm waiting for a piece of mine to be published on a website.
I'm very excited.
I'm very nervous though, too, because I wasn't sure my bio information was funny enough. Everyone else published on the website has very snappy, witty bio sketches. Mine sounded like a 5th grader's first day of school. "Hi, my name is Laura Beth and chocolate is my favorite."
Not quite that bad, but I did resort to talking about my cat..
But the site is for writers and literary people, so writing about your cat is legit, right?
Meh....
Anywho, the cat in question is Madame Mouse, etc. whose full title is the title of this blog. I'd like to explain myself.
We had no intention of getting a cat. Not a one. Especially not a stray. I already had one, my 18 year old Daisy, a feline who had more than earned her rest and right to a competition-free household by the time my husband and I married. We occasionally encouraged the neighbor's cat, Mister Jackson, to come over and give her a good staring contest to get her heart rate up, but otherwise we let her live out her golden years in peace.
But Mouse was something else. We had never seen her before the day she showed up with Mister Jackson on our front driveway--the day we got back from our honeymoon. It seemed like Mister had found himself, like Nathan, a new bride...or in cat terms, a sugar mama. Anyway, Mouse became part of our landscape. Her name, like Mister's, came from the Dresden File book series.
Writers like irony, and I liked having a cat named Mouse. But obviously it wasn't her only name.
Her name developed more after we were sure she was there to stay, a fact that became evident the morning after Daisy had to be put to sleep. Like church ladies with casseroles, Mouse, along with Mister, came prowling, curious and concerned, the next morning, sitting with us as we sat on the deck and looked over the little plot where Daisy lay.
So Mouse was adopted.
Even though she had proved herself faithful, I sometimes interchanged Mouse's name with "Dixie Tramp" because of the way she hung around Mister just to eat when he did. I began calling her "Madame" when we figured out she was Mister's booty call, as well as discovered that she had two perfectly shaped saber-toothed fangs on her bottom and lower teeth. With her dusky black coat, yellow eyes, and those teeth, she exuded vampiric tendencies.
After having her around the yard for a while, we both realized that her coat had no distinctive color, her black fur sat on top of white skin and hair, and streaks of bronzed brown ran through the coat. In some lights, these blended to look positively purple, so that too became part of her name.
"Madame Mouse the Purple Cat" seemed to encompass most of her being, but the title extended.
Her small, dainty, china doll head with its slanted eyes and calm stares were other-worldly. But it wasn't until we watched "The Mummy" that I was able to invoke her noble heritage of Underworld keepers.
But the Medieval connection, that's a new one. It came about one morning while I was having coffee, normally a time when Mouse comes inside, sits on my Ottoman and purrs while I read in the morning. This morning she was restless, wanting to be petted more than tolerated.
I ignored her and opened up one of my hymnals and began singing "Of the Father's Love Begotten", a beautiful piece from the 5th century. I like this song because it has lots of wonderful minor key strains in it and sounds mysterious and ethereal, like space.
From the door, Mouse cocked an eye in my direction, and quickly scampered up on the chair to see what I was reading. She continued to stare and purr at me for all four verses. Afterwards she blinked at me as though asking, "Is that all?" and jumped down and scampered away.
I promptly added the last touch to her title.
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