Facts You Might Not Want to Know

Song 305: This week on the playlist you can have fun hearing Facts About Cats by Timbuk3, written by Pat MacDonald. The YouTube video here has some truly entertaining segments featuring cats wearing headphones, and if you like cats, then you’ll surely enjoy the video. It seemed appropriate to follow up last week’s post of a song by my friend Jeff Larson with a Timbuk3 track because it was Jeff who introduced me to their music. Not long after their debut album Greetings from Timbuk3 appeared, he played it for me a time or 2, and that soon moved me to get my own copy. While I liked the whole record, this cut moved me the most, and before too long I knew the words by heart. Listening to it often reminds me of the moment in my life when I became aware of the fact that cats eat birds. During my childhood, my family refused to have any cats or dogs, and I guessed, from bits and pieces that I picked up, that the grandparents had had either a cat or a dog at our house that had come to a sad end, evidently by a car hitting it, so they apparently did not want to chance that possibility again. This being the case, whatever I learned about dogs and cats during visits with acquaintances who had them, I also missed knowing a few of the basics. I got my first 2 kittens in 1972, living in Evanston, and a week or 2 later, getting up one morning, I saw sister Guinevere sitting all alone, with her brother Joker nowhere in sight. I had seen both kittens taking turns climbing into the fireplace flue, but from a 2nd floor apartment occupying a 3-story building, I didn’t know if Joker could have made that long climb to the roof, although I could see no other way out of the apartment. I mentioned to the upstairs neighbor that a kitten had gone missing, and within minutes, she came down to tell me she heard what sounded like a cat crying on the roof, so I climbed up to the access hatch, I lifted it, and sure enough, there he was. Moving to Atlanta in the spring of ’74, I found an apartment on a side street with little traffic where it seemed safe enough to allow the 2 felines to roam freely outside — something too risky to do in Evanston. I felt good about the move to Atlanta, and one of the first positive changes that I noticed was hearing the birds singing, which I had never heard in Evanston. Then one day, as I sat on the porch strumming my guitar, with Joker hanging out nearby, a couple of birds flew by just under the porch ceiling, and as they did so, our boy jumped up and made threatening gestures towards them. A few days later, Joker came to the door and tried to proudly present a gift in the form of a bird carcass. During the months in Atlanta, Joker would try many times to present gifts that I didn’t want to accept, and while it didn’t make me love him any less, it did teach me a few Facts About Cats that I probably would have rather not known.