So, I love cats. I have always loved cats, my family has always owned cats, and you may remember that I was catsitting for two separate kitties over the Christmas holidays. And of course I love my spry elder kitty Winnie.
Love her a lot.
But it is a little bit surprising that I love cats so much, because I had a very traumatic experience when I was quite young involving my family’s first cat, Rocky.
He liked to photobomb me.
Rocky was not exactly the friendliest kitty. I’m surprised he is letting me pick him up in the above photo because generally Rocky was not a fan of that. Sometimes he would sit near me and allow me to pet him, but if I tried to take our snuggling to the next level he would to get grumpy and make a getaway. Fair enough, I was young so sometimes I was a bit of a dick to him. It is understandable that I was not his favourite. Winnie still does not particularly like children because of how horrible my brother was to her when he was younger. Usually I let Rocky do his own thing and didn’t bother him too badly.
Unless I had a friend over and I wanted to show off.
One day when I was about three, my childhood friends Amanda and Chad were over, and Chad and I discovered how much fun it was to harass Rocky.
We chased him around the house for the entire morning. He would try to hide from us, but wherever he went, we would find him.
Rocky would jump on top of the counter thinking it was too tall for us to be able to reach him, but we would get him.
He would hide under my parents bed to get away from us, but of course we would find him.
We played this game for a couple of hours. We would find Rocky, rough him up a little bit, he would run away, we would find him again, and repeat. Rocky got progressively more annoyed. Eventually we became bored with the harass-the-cat game and went off to play by ourselves. Rocky continued hiding.
That afternoon, hours after the Rocky-harass-fest, my mom asked me if I could go down to the basement to get a can of apple juice out of the cold cellar for snack time.
No problem. I loved apple juice. I started to make my way down the stairs to the basement.
But as I was going down the stairs, I slipped.
I lost my footing and I fell the last three steps down to the basement floor, thumping very loudly the whole way.
Rocky was still hiding from us, and his hiding spot of choice was the closet under the stairs. When Rocky heard me thumping on the stairs as I was falling, he assumed I was coming to get him. But Rocky had had enough and he was not going to take it. He decided to seek revenge.
Before I could get up, Rocky leaped out of the closet and onto my face.
He scratched me, jumped off me, and ran away to hide again.
Attacked.
He sliced me just under my nose with his front claw, all the way to my mouth. All I remember is lying on the basement floor while my mom’s best friend held a green J Cloth to my face to try and stop the bleeding. There was massive amounts of blood. Just blood everywhere.
I had to go to the emergency room, and in the end I needed to get three stitches.
Rocky lived on to have a long and amazing cat life. But he left his legacy on my face forever.
It’s fairly faint, but it is there. Of course, this was my own fault for bothering Rocky so badly. He was really just trying to protect himself.
So the moral of this story is, don’t harass cats. They will try to claw your face off.
