Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Caterwauling makes her mornings miserable

The Spokesman-Review

As a rule, I’m pretty cheerful in the morning. Still, I like to ease into the day with a cup of coffee, my newspaper and a few minutes on the patio or in a quiet house. It helps me gather my thoughts.

But in the spring, when the sun starts rising earlier, my cat, a cat with an indescribably grating voice, demands to be let out at the earliest light of dawn. He wakes me and torments me by meowing and knocking things off the furniture and onto the floor, or standing on my chest and biting my hair, until I snap and leap out of bed to chase him through the house flinging shoes and pillows, even the television remote control, at his back. Of course, once he’s outside, he immediately wants back in. For him it’s just a jog before breakfast.

So, instead of meditation and reflection, this time of year my first thoughts of the day, over the steam of my coffee cup, are dark and dangerous.

And I’m reminded of my mother and her battle with the wall.

A deep, deep sleeper, who had to get up extra early to rouse a sluggish household and give herself enough time to get ready for work, my mother couldn’t rely on anything as lightweight as an alarm clock to penetrate her consciousness. Instead she paid an answering service to make a daily wake-up call.

Bright and early each day of the week, the phone, the only phone in a big, old turn-of-the-century house, would ring. And, as per the contract, it would continue until she answered. No matter how long that took.

After three or four or six rings my mother would sit straight up, throw back the covers and hit the floor running. It was a hazardous journey.

With the shrill, insistent sound of the telephone in the distance, she navigated around the ever-present stack of books beside her bed, ran through the den dodging the toys that had been left on the floor the night before, made a sharp left in the front hall, trotted the length of the kitchen – narrowly missing the refrigerator – and picked up the wall phone on the far side of the house.

Not an easy thing to do with your eyes closed.

And every morning, as she raced through the den, she caught her left shoulder on the doorframe. That sent her spinning into the kitchen, which was a good thing. Otherwise she might have continued to run right through the house and out the front door.

Building momentum, she would lunge across the kitchen, and grab the phone the way a jet snags the cable on an aircraft carrier. “OK, OK!” she would snap and then hang up. This went on for years. And for years she griped about that wall and the bruise on her shoulder.

Occasionally, there was even more drama.

One memorable morning, as she spun across the room like a tornado skipping across the Texas plains, she touched down, in bare feet, on an elaborate ranch – bunkhouse, barn and fence – built of Lincoln logs. Asleep in my room at the top of the house I awoke to the sound of someone, using language one doesn’t usually expect from one’s mother bowling a strike in the center of my house.

To be honest, I was always a little disdainful of my mother’s morning antics. I mean, really, how much trouble can it be to get out of bed? But lately, in the spring and summer, when my cat has reduced me to raving like a madwoman, I don’t judge her as harshly.

And, you know, now that I think about it, I can’t recall ever seeing my Lincoln Logs after the morning they got in my mother’s way. It’s like they vanished off the face of the earth.

That cat had better be careful.