Sick Day Hockey

This one time, many years ago, I got sick.

Not HUGELY sick, but snuffly, runny nose, not feeling great, drink lots of liquids, skip work, stay home, and stay in bed sick. A cold. Minor flu. The sniffles. Whaddever you call it. Not sick enough to seek out a doctor, but sick enough that a day or two in pajamas and lots of OJ and chicken soup seemed called for.

I lived alone at the time, with two cats, Faust and Chaos, in a small apartment. The bedroom was also the living room, and the main trash can was a large box at the foot of my bed. This made it convenient; sit up, blow nose, toss tissue in box, lay back down. Lather, rinse repeat.

Until the moment when I blew my nose... and Faust leaped up onto one of the footposts. And looked at me expectantly. And when I tried to toss the tissue into the trash box, he promptly slapped it back at me. Took me three tries to outsmart the cat and get it into the box.

Tissue after that, he slapped it AWAY from me, onto the floor. “You! Shall! Not! Pass!”

I should have been irritated. I was not. If you’ve ever stayed home sick from work, particularly before cable on demand and streaming movies, you might remember how dull daytime TV was, and this was actually a welcome diversion. Fake the cat out, feint left and throw right, feint high and throw low, and whoops, the cat overbalanced and fell in the trash box. A moment later, he struggled out and promptly took his position on the footpost again.

Got to the point where every time I blew my nose, the cat came running. By that evening, Chaos had joined Faust, and getting the tissue into the box on the first throw was a serious challenge. Little white rosettes decorated the floor around the bed everywhere. I developed a strategy where, if I could get a cat to fall in the box, I would then toss the tissue on THAT side, so the remaining cat couldn’t get to it to slap it out of the air, and the cat in the box was too busy to react.

The next day, I tried that. Chaos stumbled, and fell into the box... where I found she had figured it out; the tissue went into the box, then got slapped into the air, where Faust promptly swatted it into the living room. They’d learned to cooperate. The only way to get it into the box after that was to shoot for the exact middle of the footboard, where neither cat could reach if he or she was sitting on a post.

After a few shots like that, Faust began suddenly leaping off the post onto the footboard, just to slap those middle shots down. After a few more, Chaos began doing it too. And after about the tenth center shot, BOTH cats leaped, collided in the middle, and fell into the trash box. And I laughed until it hurt, while both cats clambered out of the box and took their positions on the bedposts like irritated furry gargoyles, waiting for the next pitch.

This went on for a Friday and a weekend, and by Monday, I felt well enough to return to work, to the cats’ dismay. But for the rest of the time I lived in that apartment, blowing my nose was always a call for the cats to come running and leap onto the footposts...

I miss those cats. I think it may have been the only time in my life when I remember fondly a time when I was sick, thanks to them...