The Cats’ Meow!
The Cats’ Meow
“Hi! The cats are all stoned,” I tell Dane when he arrives on Friday night. “We should be able to play without any interference tonight.”
Friday nights mean two things at my house: Dane and I will be playing Rummikub, and we’ll be eating fish. Until now, it’s also meant that our game will get interrupted many times by our frisky feline family and, in turn, by Téte, the barking wonder dog.
Earlier today I made a trip to the Sweet Valley Artisans store in Coon Valley. It’s a long drive from rural Viola, but it’s worth it. Their catnip toys are the real deal, and my cats go crazy for them. On this trip, I bought four toys for four dollars each. Sixteen dollars is a cheap price to pay to spend a quiet games-and-dinner evening with my hubby. Yes, this is a well-thought-out catnip party intended to get them high so they’ll zonk out early and let us enjoy a peaceful evening of friendly competition and healthy food. Call PETA if you must! I make no apologies. Dane agrees it’s a brilliant plan.
The toys are 9-inch long catnip-filled tubes handmade from various types of printed fabric. I’m not certain if the crafters grow the catnip themselves, but it’s the only catnip my cat crew are interested in—in fact, obsessed with.
As soon as I arrived home from Coon Valley, I doled out the toys, a matching set of red, white, and pink fabrics in Valentine’s Day patterns. Maurice was curled up inside his bed on the counter, so I tucked his toy in with him. By the time I walked over to Dane’s desk to give Lorca a toy, Maurice had his cradled in his front paws and was licking it madly like a popsicle on a hot day.
Lorca nearly fell off the desk when he grabbed his catnip toy. I tossed the remaining two tubes into the snake pit of cats that were playing a brutal game of chase and tackle on the kitchen floor.
Now I’m getting dinner out of the oven. Tonight it’s lemon-roasted broccoli to which I’ll add a sprinkle of Parmesan cheese, then put a giant spoonful of brown rice on each plate and add a good-sized portion of Coho salmon.
Meanwhile, Dane is clearing off the kitchen island, removing the giant bowl of cat kibble, miscellaneous papers and books, and Merlin’s cat bed. He pushes the other cat bed, occupied by sleepy Maurice, to one side. Maurice is allowed to stay on the island counter when we play because he never moves much, and even less when he’s coming down from a catnip high.
While the fish cooks on the stove, the cats are meowing, causing Téte to bark, and there’s a battle raging for the two toys I threw on the floor. Dane gets out the dreaded spray bottle that all the cats and dogs here despise. Just seeing him holding it is enough to calm everyone down. Soon they’ll all be catnipped and quiet—at least the felines.
Next I remove the fish skin, cut it into three appropriately sized pieces, and toss them to the by-now-sitting-at-attention good dogs. Finny gets the tiniest piece, Téte the largest, and Ruben’s is somewhere in between. The toss is important—they snap it out of the air and swallow it whole. No sense holding on to it if you value your fingers.
Dane takes out the blue velvet pouch that holds the numbered Rummikub tiles. They clatter onto the counter top and scatter in all directions. We turn them all face down, place our hands on top of them, and move them like you would on a Ouija Board to mix them up, then proceed to play.
Dane starts off with the required 30 points to open the game. I don’t have enough points so I pick a piece from the pile, then tell him, “You go.” On his second turn Dane also has to pick a chip and says, “You go,” and this continues until we can start making moves: “You go,” “You go,” until it starts to sound like “Hugo, Hugo.”
Tonight we have a tie breaker, as Dane wins the first match and I win the second. We realize we haven’t had to stop the game to remove a cat, pick up any tiles they’ve knocked down to the floor, or even yell at Téte to get out of the garbage can that she knows holds the empty fish package.
I won’t brag about who won that last game, but I will about how well the catnip worked, giving us old newlyweds a much-needed quiet evening.