My Cat

My delight here is twofold: I saw Alien for the first time in an historic theater, and I love my cat.

At the beginning of the month, we saw my all-time favorite movie, The Princess Bride, at the summer movie series that runs in the beautiful and historic Ohio Theater. There is something way more fun about seeing an old movie on the big screen than merely watching it at home. And, even better, we were sitting behind other super fans. You see, I can recite every line of The Princess Bride. I'm pretty certain that when I'm old and in a memory care facility, this is what I will remember when my own name escapes me. I am also completely self-aware that reciting the lines of a movie is a very irritating habit, but I just can't help myself when I watch this particular movie! That's why I don't usually encourage people to watch it with me and why it was lucky that the people sitting near me were doing it too and wouldn't hate me. 

Anyway, it was so fun that Pete and I decided to go back again the next week and see Alien. I had somehow never seen this movie, and while it was delightfully creepy and suspenseful, what really struck me was that it stars a cat! 

In fact--and I don't think this will be a spoiler to anyone considering the movie came out forty-six years ago--the cat and Sigourney Weaver are the only survivors at the end! I kept marveling at how they got the cat to react in the perfect way. Then I googled it and found out that it was actually four cats in the movie, all with different temperaments that matched different scenes. 

Seeing those cats on screen made me want to write a post about my own cat, Mr. Pickles, who brings me much delight. This continues to be surprising to me because I never thought I would be a pet owner and for most of my life I was afraid of cats. When my family got a cat while I was away at college, I cried and thought I would have to live with my grandma! That Gretchen would have never believed that she would someday have a cat that she would hold like a baby and allow to sleep in her bed.

Yesterday, I was preparing for the oral defense of my candidacy exams, and I was feeling so extremely nervous. Usually Mr. Pickles is off sleeping somewhere during the day, but yesterday he was following me around everywhere, sitting on top of my papers as I reviewed, and jumping into my lap. He's not usually a very vocal cat, but he was also very chatty yesterday. It occurred to me that maybe he sensed my anxiety and was trying to comfort me.

Sure enough, when I got on my Zoom call, he was right at my feet, but as the conversation got going and I began to calm down, I realized that he had left the room. I guess he knew his job was done.