Stiff Upper Whisker
There’s a great deal of glee that comes with being able to puff billowing tendrils of warm air out to form the genie-like apparition we know as smoke stacks. No real smoke, just warm air meeting cold in the battle to keep an upper hand. Silliness when you think about it because they work so well together.
This is childsome play of course but it’s still such a fascinating amusement after all these years. And free too! Drawing in long stalagmite-length breaths that make our bodies tingle from the crispness of the intake and finally allowing it to explode into the space outside ourselves in dragon breathing fashion. I laugh, (an I-don’t- care-I’m-going-to-do-it-anyway) laugh at how easily I find it to amuse myself with all small manner of things.
My neighbour told me that Larry (Lazza) isn’t well, she took him to the vet despite his catheadedness that everything was fine. Denial till the end. Stiff upper whisker and all that, that’s our Lazza! Dumb too if you ask me. He has a lot in common with some of his human counterparts!
He’s recuperating she tells me, no yard hopping for him for a while. I’m relieved though, someone needed to take things in hand. The state of denial can make us have wonky thoughts. And there’s no telling us when we do. Are you guilty too?
Admitting guilt on this score is healthy you know, I admit when I get a bee in my bonnet because I’m in denial that the wonky thoughts kind of make my house look lop-sided. It doesn’t feel that way on the inside [because I’m usually in denial] but it can kind of look skewiff when you venture outside finally.
It can be a shock to the system when you see what everyone else has been seeing all along. In my old life they would have referred to that as a pane in the old Johari window, it’s an ancient HR term that describes the part of ourselves we can’t see but which is painfully clear to everyone else. Ring a bell anyone? Hmmm!!
Anyway, it’s probably a good thing that Lazza hasn’t cottoned on to the fact that humans aren’t completely drawn into the whole territorial thing when it comes to a cats’s health. They [humans] can somehow shrug off the low grumbles emanating from a not-too-happy cat meant to warn off other cats. Unfortunately (or fortunately) for Lazza, like him, humans too have a propensity for deafness when it suits them. Payback, in his case, of the kindest kind of course.
All this from making smoke stacks, but at least I can breathe easier. Mateship has a way of rushing to our side when we least understand it. It’s meant to be that way I think, if we understood it, precisely at the moment we were experiencing it we’d probably never give it the true value it really deserves.
So, I blow a kiss in the direction of Lazza’s house and hope he recuperates well, I know he’d do the same for me. Get well soon mate, till then, whoosh … I love how they hang in the air these smoke stacks that aren’t smoke, don’t you?
