Cat Tales
Not all cats are aware they are not dogs. Among the animals buried in our backyard lies Tiglath Pileser III (addressed and commonly referenced as “Tig”), who, to the very day he crawled up and lay at Denise’s feet to die, suffered from the illusion he was a dog. The only dog he knew, a nervous chihuahua belonging to my mother-in-law, went along with the ruse.
When the doorbell rang, Tig would always go to greet the visitor, follow him into the recesses of the house, and endeavor to engage him in conversation. Tig himself was a considerable raconteur, who entertained us with stories about his distant relatives in the Orient, his sometime excursion into the far reaches of the Amazon, his fascination with bullfighting, the seasonal vagaries of the stock market, reports on the duck competition at the Kansas State Fair, and his high interest in Tennyson. I did not entirely believe all this; you can usually tell when a cat exaggerates.
Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).
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more from the online archives
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22.5—June 2009
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