Catalog and Other Cat Scratchings‪!‬

This little book is a series of short but connected compositions all falling within a single unifying, common category – Cats! My original, 1982 book titled Light and Dark had contained a fourteen page subsection I called “Catalog” . It consisted of a richly rhyme-ripened account of an amorous Tomcat and his major affairs and misadventures with some thirteen of his principal “lady loves” It was a fun collection both to write and to read to others and even came to briefly enjoy a limited existence as a small gift size booklet in the promotional service of its larger parental volume. In that capacity, it had a rather mixed measure of success. This was almost certainly due to an irrefutable fact about cats. Even in their most congenially conceived and sympathetically anthropomorphized imagined manifestations they still belong to that finically unique “cat” category. And it’s a category which they are reluctant to share especially in any context involving the least degree of doggerel! Seriously though, within this small collection you’ll encounter a quite varied offering of feminine felines including: Joyce with her golden Rolls Royce of a voice; Elaine who always seemed pooped and had whiskers that drooped as if they’d been in the rain; Jenny the jumping “gymnat” cat; Cleo, a crazy little Calico who proved that unlike a book you can tell a cat by its cover; and Louise, a Siamese whose oriental flea powder always made him sneeze, among others. In other, later penned cat poems found here you’ll discover all the distinguishing differences between Chinese acupuncture and “attack-you-puncture” as practiced by the Siamese as well as the comparing of bathing practices by dogs and cats, and even learn from no less an authority than Professor Chessor Katz just why cats so rarely smile! And it all concludes with a prose piece about a strange kind of “daydream” involving a very curious conversation with Mark Twain.