The Slice: Welcome to March meowness

About 75 Spokane area cats auditioned to be The Slice’s official “March comes in like a lion” felines.

All would have made excellent spokesmodels. Quite a few had engaging stories and appealing owners.

In the end I chose three that seem to represent the air of entitlement and skeptical nature that makes cats intriguing.

Ruth Jackson’s pet, Hyde, has actually been in the column before. He’s the cat who was missing for five months and then returned home, a few pounds heavier than when he left.

He likes to plop down on The Spokesman-Review, which can make reading the paper a challenge.

Chloe, a rescued stray, belongs to Andrea Sharps and Chuck Horgan. When she’s not busy roaring like the old MGM movie-intro mascot, Chloe enjoys basking in the sun and watching birds through the window.

So OK, maybe she just pretends to roar.

And regal Rufus, an enormous Maine Coon cat belonging to Shirley and John Calkins, just seems to project a leonine attitude that says it all.

So welcome to March. Have a good month.

“My mistake: I transposed a couple of letters in Sidney Blomquist’s name in Tuesday’s column. Sorry.

“Slice answer (surreal moments): “I’ve seen my share of famous writers and talked to them at parties in Cheney during the years when I was working on my master of fine arts in creative writing,” wrote George Thomas.

But the encounter that stands out in his memory was pure happenstance.

It was the summer of 1979. School was not in session at Eastern. Thomas and a friend were driving in Cheney on a sunny day. They went past a house on a corner and the guy with Thomas said, “Ain’t that Ginsberg?”

It was, in fact, the famous poet Allen Ginsberg, a writer Thomas genuinely admired. He was sitting in the lotus position in a yard, apparently meditating. Thomas remembers that he was “dappled with sunshine.”

“We went to grab a camera — my friend was working for The Easterner — and we returned. We got to spend a couple of hours with Ginsberg.”

The poet was in Cheney visiting a friend’s family.

Thomas still shakes his head about the unlikelihood of the encounter.

“It was quite a find,” he wrote. “A shock of discovery.”

“Today’s Slice question: I first realized I needed glasses when I was a young adult. A moviegoing companion informed me that the credits after the end of “Kramer vs. Kramer” were not, in fact, out of focus. What clued you in to the reality that you needed corrective lenses?