Feline The Love

Catness runs in our family.  Some of us, including me, have vaguely feline features - something about the eyes  and the skin around the eyes and the eyebrows and the freckles... We recognized this long before Ian was a factor.

But without any prompting, Ian picked up the feline theme.  He has the same kind of facial structure, eyes, etc., that I do, that resemble a cat, and Amy always thought he looked like one.  For that reason, it was no surprise, some years ago, when Ian attended his cousin's birthday party at Build-A-Bear, and rather than select one of their trademark bears, he went straight for the cat.  I think the cat was far cuter than the bears, and cost a bit more, but Amy was okay with that - she saw the affinity between cat and owner.

And years later, the fact emerged that Madeleine is a cat, or,  more properly, several cats.  Sometimes she's Pinky-Foot, sometimes she's Whiskers, sometimes she's Rainbow Sparkle, but for at least part of most weeks of the year, Madeleine is indeed a cat, and she meows and will only respond to her cat-name, and talks in colorful detail about eating mice out of the freezer.

And, just as uncannily, when Madeleine became Pinky-Foot, there were times when she would designate a stuffed cat (of which she has several) to be Pinky-Foot, rather than herself, and one of the first figures to act in loco PinkyFootis turned out to be Ian's famous cat from that Build-A-Bear birthday party all those years ago.  Madeleine adopted Ian's cat - apparently believing that she (probably formerly he, but most of Madeleine's animals are "she," including Snoopy) - anyway, apparently Madeleine believes that she - the stuffed, striped, rather tabby-ish stuffed cat of Ian's earlier childhood - is hers, and is Pinky-Foot, at those times when Madeleine herself chooses not to be Pinky-Foot.  It's a bit like Horus and Osiris:  the Egyptians believed that each of their Pharoah was the "god" Horus during his lifetime, but as soon as he died, he became Osiris, instead, and the new Pharoah became Horus.  Kind of like:  "Osiris is dead; long live Horus!"

But anyway...

So Madeleine adopted Ian's stuffed cat as her own alter-ego Pinky-Foot, to take on the persona at times when she didn't feel like "owning" it herself.  And over time, Madeleine has come to own many stuffed cats of her own, out of her own tremendous love for cats.

And this past evening, when we got back from the beach (4th of July Fireworks, etc.), Ian lay down on the bed in the master bedroom, grabbed hold of one of Madeleine's stuffed cats - this one shaped into a perfect ball, like those newfangled stuffed animals you might find in places like the Bronx Zoo gift shop - and lay on the bed, a la feline, tossing the cat-ball up into the air with his four "paws," and, as he languished in cathood, he exclaimed out loud:

"I feel so much like a cat right now!"

Sometimes, we all feel so much like a cat.

(July 5, 2013)