We Don’t Know Where Your Cat Is

We Don’t Know Where Your Cat Is

We’re cat-sitting, apparently.

It was my wife’s idea. My wife is nice that way. I barely talk to my neighbors, so this is not a situation I would have gotten us into.

Do we want cats? Not particularly. We’re more chicken people. But you do things for neighbors. And if your neighbor says, for example, “Can you watch my child?” You don’t ask, “Well, does he ruin the furniture?” You just do it. And some day they’ll do it for you. People did this kind of thing in the Gemara all the time.

Though if I remember from the Gemara, it didn’t always end well.

But anyway, their other cat (Oreo) has been doing favors for us. Namely, he’s been helping us catch the mice in our detached garage that have been attracted by the chicken food we keep in there, in that we let him have as many mice as he can eat, and in return he stops eyeing our chickens and licking his lips.

At least we think he’s been helping us catch the mice. I’ve found dead mice outside near all 4 corners of our house at this point, and it might have been Oreo who left them there. Which is a weird message.

I don’t know if the mice are still there. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a home with a cat, but apparently a lot of what they do is walk around bumping into everything like a drunk person. According to my neighbor, this is how the cat spreads its scent onto everything to drive away mice and also people who are allergic to cat hair. Which I can’t imagine is what the cat wants—to get them to leave. That’s its strategy going in. Also, we bump into everything, so by this logic the whole house smells like us, which is something we vaguely know of from when we go on vacation and come back and go, “What is that smell?” but we try not to think about it, and yet if there are just people in a house, the mice make zero effort to leave.

So that’s the other reason my wife wanted us to catsit—because the thing is that if the mice leave a location, they have to go somewhere, and the closest somewhere is our house.

But we’re not watching Oreo. Oreo is what is called an outdoor cat. Apparently, there is such a thing as an outdoor cat, which is not just another word for a stray. You can own an outdoor cat, though I’m not sure that the outdoor cats are aware of this fact. I would actually be okay with having an outdoor cat. I already have several outdoor cats, I think. They show up outside my house whenever I bring out the garbage in the middle of the night. It’s terrifying. So what’s one more?

Oreo in particular I continuously run into in the dark while going to check on my chickens.

(I’m going to check on my chickens.)

(Possibly he is too.) 

It’s always awkward. I go, “Aah!” and he pretends he has somewhere else to be.

So Oreo does not need to be catsat. He knows where all the garbage cans in town are and he has a deal with us on mice that he might have with other neighbors too, because I do know he’s not here full time, and I know this because I left the garage door open for him once and then I we had an opossum in there that was living in the chickens’ hay stash and I had to figure out how to get it out.

(I did look up what animal eats opossums, and the answer is large owls, fox, coyotes, wolves, and bobcats. So now I need to find a neighbor who has one of those.)

So no, the cat we’re sitting is named Shmudgie, which is literally what you would expect to be the name of a cat owned by the Schmutters. (Maybe we would have spelled it Schmudgie.)

“What do we feed it?” we asked. Because our chickens, in addition to sharing food with the mice, eat our leftovers.

And they said, “We’ll give you food; don’t feed her anything else or she’ll throw up.”

I don’t think that’s true, because Oreo eats everything. Personally, I think that they did their trial and error, and mine will be different.

I bet they haven’t tried feeding it lasagna.

What they gave us was this shopping bag full of loose stuff that looks like Shabbos cereal but does not smell like Shabbos cereal.

“Should we put milk on it?” 

No. That’s a common misconception. Cats in the wild do not drink cow milk. They just eat their Shabbos cereal plain.

Okay, so what is it like to have a cat in the house?

You know when you walk into a room and you’re not sure where your friend went, and then he jumps out and yells, “Boo!” and you ask yourself why you keep hanging out with him? Every single moment with a cat is like that. Except the cat doesn’t yell boo; he just darts away, like you’re the one who scared him.

Every time you turn back, you’re like, “Where’s the cat?”

It’s never in the same place twice.

The first thing Shmudgie did when she got to our house was she ran under the dining room table and jumped up on one of the chairs that were tucked in. This would #1 make her harder to find, and #2 be a nice surprise when someone pulled out a chair to sit down. Which I did, and she took it personally.

Later that night, she discovered the basement, and when I went down to look for her, I couldn’t find her. The next morning I came down, in the dark, and saw her slide behind the washing machine, which is somewhere I never even thought to check. And now every time I come down, I check behind the washing machine.

She’s never there.

The ridiculous thing is I spend about half the day looking for this cat, #1 because I’m responsible for it, and #2 so I don’t get scared unexpectedly. But I look cautiously, in case it jumps out. It never does.

Honestly, I was hoping to get an article out of all this, but the cat is not interested in being in one of my articles. It knows.

She comes up to eat. That’s the only thing she does that makes noise—you suddenly hear her crunching on the Shabbos cereal. And you can say, “Oh good, she’s eating. And she’s still here.”

Basically, for the first few days, the cat was like a teenager bein hazmanim. She stayed out of sight and showed up on the ground floor a couple of times a day for food. Frequently after midnight.

She loves my daughter for some reason. My daughter, who, in her other job, is a kindergarten morah. My daughter does this thing where she has the cat smell her hand as she approaches. And the cat will always stop what it’s doing, even if it’s important, and take the time to smell it. “Did you sanitize? I don’t want dirty hands touching me. Did you just touch the chickens?” And then she’ll sit in my daughter’s lap.

But it doesn’t work for me. Even if my hands smell like cat food.

My wife eventually asked our neighbor about it, and our neighbor said, “That’s funny; I think she only likes girls.”

Now you tell us.

They do say you can learn tznius from a cat.

Shmudgie did start hanging out upstairs a little more eventually. Mostly on our couch, where she sleeps like 16 hours a day, looking like a throw pillow, in case someone wants to sit down.

I still don’t know why she hates me.

So from what I can tell, most of having a cat is wondering where it is, trying not to sit on it, watching it lick its own feet on your sofa, and remembering not to leave chopped meat thawing. 

But imagine babysitting was like this. “I couldn’t find your kid the entire time, but I know I didn’t open any doors, so it has to be in the house somewhere. I came down to the basement to look, but I didn’t find it, and then I was scared it would jump out at me.”

“Did you try giving it Shabbos cereal?”

I still don’t know if we have mice, but I don’t think this cat knows either. If we did, maybe they packed up and went to a third location, like my neighbor’s house.

We should really give them back their cat. n

Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia and is the author of seven books, published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send questions, comments, or ideas to [email protected]. Read more of Mordechai Schmutter’s articles at 5TJT.com.