Classy cat

Our last night at Mohonk was fairly peaceful though Dad, who had gone to bed early, heard my computer beeping, and sat up in alarm. “Are you using the computer?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “Thank god. I thought it was going to explode,” he replied. He finally mastered the route to the bathroom, so I got a pretty decent night’s sleep.

On Saturday, we headed back. As we got closer to his house, Dad became an antsy geezer, asking over and over if he could take off his seatbelt and get out. Dad doesn’t like seatbelts – he finds them uncomfortable. I don’t think they existed when he was young. Once we got back to his apartment, Dad settled in and I put the cat, who was desperate for attention, on his lap. He gave her a cat massage – something he used to do to my mother’s cats a lot, but which I haven’t seen him do in years. Afterwards, he looked at the limp, blessed-out cat in his lap, and said, “she doesn’t want to leave now.”

By Sunday, I was totally fried from days of 24-hr Dad duty, so we asked our friend Michael to come sit with him. I felt a little guilty, but I really needed to rest and reorient myself. Michael gave Dad his dinner and listened to jazz with him.

Tonight I arrived to find Dad with two bowls on the counter – one was his salad and the other was filled with cat food, though a tomato from the salad had somehow wound up in the cat food. I was afraid that Dad would accidentally eat the cat food, so I took it from him and put it down for the cat.

Dad had cats on the brain tonight. He called his cat “classy,” and said to me, “Cats don’t get anything free, or do they?” I had to explain that people usually pay for the things cats need!

Then he was peering curiously at my computer, so I moved it close to him and guided his hands over it while explaining the various parts. Then I gave him a demonstration of various things it could do – played some music on internet radio, showed him a photo of himself (which he couldn’t really see), played the NPR news, looked up the answer to his question about when ice cream was invented. He was totally amazed, though he didn’t quite understand – he thought that a bigger computer would have access to more information. I explained to him that as technology advances, things are actually getting smaller, but I don’t know if that idea took hold.