Service with a Smile

I had dinner the other night with my friend and colleague Ed, an art-book publisher who travels to Houston often. I tease him that he is the king of books in the great state of Texas because he has a knack for cornering the market in the museum-publishing world that exists in Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio as well as here in Houston. It is no wonder given Ed’s talents. Anyway, we went to Hugo’s, one of my favorite restaurants that serves authentic Mexican cuisine. The waiter approached our table with a friendly grin and introduced himself as Steve. He said, “I’ll be taking care of you tonight.”

I haven’t heard this touchy-feely phrase for some time, maybe because I tend to like self-serve restaurants or brunch buffets. But I laughed when I thought about bounding down the stairs of our house early each morning, and then up the stairs to the garage apartment, to announce to our ten cats—whose mouths are wide open in anticipation of their feeding ritual—“Hello, I’m your Cat Lady. I’ll be taking care of you this morning.” I could repeat this “taking care of you” phrase each evening, and I’m good to go with it for the rest of their lives.

Lucius et al. endorse repetition, unlike picky editors who query, “perhaps vary word choice to avoid repetition?” Serving our ten cats with a smile presents a different set of challenges than when I am at the office, serving the museum’s curators behind the scenes as an advocate for their respective voices. In both cases, though, I feel fulfilled and glad that my jobs depend on the desire to help others.

Query of the Day: Do you provide service with a smile to your cats? (It is OK to frown when you find hairballs.)

Miu Miu and Meow Meow

If I had a disposable income, I would be wearing this shoe around town to strut my stuff as a card-carrying Cat Lady. The designer Miu Miu introduced a feline-print black satin shoe on the spring runway, and I could own a pair of these spiffy pumps for a cool $585. Neiman Marcus, here I come. I wish.

There is something to be said for making a fashion statement as a Cat Lady, although I wonder if my cats would reject me upon sniffing my feet and realizing that I am not wearing my trusty Docksiders.

Of course, I like to think of my group as enlightened felines, and they might add “ooh-la-la” and “très chic” to their repertoire of meows.

Query of the Day: Do you advertise your Cat Lady status on foot?

Breaking News

My husband watches “Morning Joe” religiously, and he tells me that a staff writer and videographer for Politico was breaking news yesterday—news of a different kind. Patrick Gavin wasn’t covering a political scandal or uncovering a politician’s affair. He wasn’t gossiping about the media. Instead, he was “outing himself” as a Cat Lady. Apparently Mr. Gavin has nabbed the cover of a forthcoming issue of Cat Fancy.

The “Morning Joe” anchors dug deep, turning the tables on a journalist accustomed to dealing with the movers and shakers of the nation’s capital and to probing behind the scenes of the D.C. power structure. Mika and Joe asked Mr. Gavin to divulge the number of cats with whom he keeps company. My husband missed the “Big Reveal,” but I imagine that Mr. Gavin responded, “many,” or, at least, “a few.” Or is it possible to get the cover of Cat Fancy and live with one cat instead of multiples?

Query of the Day: Would you pose for Cat Fancy?

Those Paws Were Made for Walkin’

Did every Cat Lady exclaim “Say what?” when the news broke of Charles, a brown tabby cat who walked the 1,300 miles from his Albuquerque home to Chicago?

Charles disappeared from his home about eight months ago when his Cat Lady left to pursue volunteer work with Habitat for Humanity in New Orleans. Just last week, a staff member of the Chicago Animal Care and Control agency found Charles wandering the streets of the “City of the Big Shoulders,” as Carl Sandburg famously wrote. Because a tracking microchip was embedded between Charles’s shoulder blades, the agency was able to trace the cat to his Cat Lady in New Mexico. A kind-hearted cat lover and fellow resident of Albuquerque paid for Charles to return home in record time via the wings of American Airlines.

Among the amazing facts of this story is that Charles’s paws did not become calloused or dirty during his long and winding journey on foot. I keep hearing in my head a new version of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” only now Nancy Sinatra (or Billy Ray Cyrus had a great version of the hit tune, too) sings about Charles and his apparently Teflon-strength paws.

I would love to meet Charles and congratulate him on his indomitable strength of spirit and his phenomenal physical endurance. I wonder if he knew somehow that, if he kept walking, he would cross paths eventually with a person who would walk the talk of a Cat Lady and whisk him to safety.

Here’s to you, Charles, and please: no more walkabouts!

Query of the Day: Have you ever lost your cat?

Exhibit A

I have enjoyed reading the comic strip by Bizarro for some time, and ever since I became a Cat Lady, I have noticed that Bizarro makes frequent references to the feline world. I don’t know if Bizarro is a man or a woman, but I am certain that the comic-strip artist has the heart of a cat lady.

Bizarro’s witty and wise one-liners speak volumes. If my cats could read (other than my mind), they would grab the newspaper out of my hands each morning and turn to the page featuring Bizarro’s always entertaining comics.

Take a look at a recent comic by Bizarro, which I am calling Exhibit A. I’ll let you be the judge of whether another soul mate is in our midst.

Query of the Day: What are your favorite comic strips featuring felines?

Mommy Dearest

I recently completed a book project on John Singer Sargent and his Houston connection. Unknown to many people, Houston has the third-largest concentration (after New York and Boston) of privately held masterpieces by the artist. In his essay for the book, Richard Ormond, a great-nephew of Sargent, paints an intimate portrait of the artist who was “always on the move.” Yet Sargent was introverted in his personal life, and, according to Ormond, his “reserve and shyness went back to boyhood, perhaps the consequence of a possessive and overdominant mother.” This statement prompted me to look at myself more closely and to ask: Am I guilty of overreaching with our ten cats?

Lucius, Lydia, Lillie, Leo, T.J., Perkins, Miss Tommie, Linus, L.B., and Alvar all consider me to be their mother, at least the human replacement for their own birth mothers. I am possessive of them to a fault, but I won’t beat myself up over having deep maternal feelings for felines. I suppose you could say I am bossy when it comes to telling the cats when I will, or will not, feed them outside of their normal schedules. I often go toe to toe, or paw to paw, with Lucius to determine which one of us will win the strategic game of domination and mental supremacy.

Only Leo would qualify for wearing the mantle of being reserved and shy. The other nine cats are sociable and outgoing, and L.B. wins the prize for being extroverted. So I believe I have good reason to think positive thoughts that my personality is not like that of Sargent’s mother, and that I am not scarring our cats for their next round of nine lives.

And then there is Lydia (pictured above), the only female in our household, and as such the only one who relates to me on a mother-daughter level. She likes the smell of L’Occitane’s verbena soap and Jo Malone’s gardenia perfume, and she loves to observe me getting ready for my “other job” each morning. One of the simple pleasures of my life is watching Lydia sitting in her sphinx pose, at my feet, and gazing at me. Is it too much to hope that she thinks of me as her mommy dearest, in the truest sense of these two words?

Query of the Day: What is your parental style?

Open Door Policy

I could have sworn that I closed the door to the laundry room last night, but when I returned to begin a new load of wash, I found some unexpected little helpers. Alvar (left) and L.B. (inside the dryer) like the smell of Downey fabric softener, and they enjoy even more the feel of warm blankets fresh from tumbling in the dryer.

Of all our ten cats, Alvar and L.B. are the most intrepid explorers. They both like to open doors and cabinets at all hours of the day: Alvar gravitates to those in the bathrooms, and L.B. likes especially the cabinets in the kitchen because he knows he can find bags of kibbles and packets of treats lining the shelves. By the way, L.B. seems to have put himself on a weight-loss program and is experiencing moderate success. At his last weigh-in, he tipped the scale at 20 lbs.

I am so glad that the door to our home was open (figuratively speaking) when my husband and I first saw Alvar and L.B more than six years ago. There was still room for another two cats, as we had not yet achieved our current full-house status.

Unlike in my office environment, which has an open door policy, we do not have an official policy in place in our personal living space. Suffice it to say that our hearts remain open to helping cats, and that the door will never shut tight on them.

Query of the Day: Are your cats “Cat Lady’s Helpers”?

It’s in the DNA

I read an inspiring newspaper article in the Houston Chronicle about a woman who believes she was born with “the animal rescue gene,” as she puts it. When she was a child, she always brought home every stray or wounded animal. I cannot claim doing the same ever since I was a kid. But a recent round of spring cleaning at home unearthed a small box containing some Kodachrome slides of me at a tender age, enjoying the company of cats. These originally color-saturated images have led me to reconsider whether the Cat Lady gene is indeed part of my DNA.

My mother had labeled one envelope “Prissy the cat.” I would be telling a lie to say that I vividly remember Prissy, the Siamese cat who lived next door to us in New Orleans. The slides portray me as a two-year-old child sporting the then “it” style of Shirley Temple curls. Apparently I liked Prissy very much and looked forward to seeing her walk across the neighbor’s lawn to the front steps of our house. But I was confused one day when Prissy brought a bird to me as “a present.” My mother reports that I became mad at Prissy for killing the bird, although I came around to forgiving the cat.

Finding the unexpected treasure trove of images has prompted me to think further of our—the Cat Ladies’—shared cause. Were we predestined to rescue and care for cats? Maybe Prissy already knew, way back when, of what was in the cards for this once curly-haired girl.

Query of the Day: Were you born to be a Cat Lady?

Let’s Meow for Madonna

I have grown old with Madonna. We don’t know each other, although I like to think we have a slightly personal connection. My late aunt was a recording executive, and one of her first test projects in the studio was to audition a very young and inexperienced Madonna—in other words, she met the “not yet Madonna.” I have watched Madonna’s many transformations through the years, and I am wondering if the Material Girl has become a Cat Lady.

While flipping through the pages of the April issue of Vogue, I stopped in my tracks. There is Madonna, voluptuous cleavage and all, wearing a Dolce & Gabanna black bustier. And there is a black-and-white cat who appears to be more than a standard-issue prop for Madonna. True, the coloring of the cat coordinates perfectly with Madonna’s garb, her sunglasses, and her diamond-encrusted cross suspended from a necklace. But Madonna’s caress of the cat reveals a certain softer, maybe even more vulnerable, side to the performing artist than meets the eye.

I would be interested to know whether a stylist selected the cat, or whether the cat belongs to the photographer of the advertisement, or whether Madonna herself pleaded for this particular kitty to help her make a fashion statement. Could Madonna have reached a point in her life where she prefers the companionship of felines?

Madonna is nobody’s fool, and perhaps one day she’ll make a recording with this refrain: Cats Rule…and Sell!

Query of the Day: What are your favorite advertisements featuring cats?