Not *that* kind. Get your mind out of the gutter...

Daybreak dawns in Buffalo. I feel a tickle alongside my cheek, a whisker. Could be anyone's until I feel a very cold, very wet, very boogery nose poke through my lips and I sputter myself awake. Good morning, China Dolly.

Sufficiently Listerined, I trudge back to bed. My husband's got the sports talk radio on and for some crackpot reason it seems to spew forth something about what the presidential debates and the recent economic unpleasantness have to do with the selection of the new Hockey Night in Canada theme. It's barely after 5:00AM and I lumber into bed.

China, unsatisfied with her earlier excavations into my mouth, decides to examine further and I taste a mixed bouquet of paw, fur and Tidy Cats, with a sprinkling of catnip from a rather aged source. I have a preference for the cleaner taste of Arm & Hammer Odor Control myself, but at this hour I can't be choosy. Sufficiently Listerined, back to bed.

There is a mighty sound of thunder rolling toward the bedroom, and a great dawn-shattering "OOF!" this is what Brandy Jumping on Mama sounds like. She swats the inspecting China-paw away and bends down the Lick The Mama, as Mama must be clean before she has to go to work at noon.

WHUMPH!!! Stosh taking a run and thudding into the side of the mattress. A shriek as he pounces and wrestles that fierce serpent, Mama's braid. Stosh is the one purring.

FWOMPH. The sound of Philip plumping himself into the bed and slacking between me and Louie. He has been breaking out of his shell and joining us more and more. I smell something herby in the air around him. The proposed new Hockey Night in Canada theme takes on a hallucinatory air of the Grateful Dead. Roxie trills in time to Mama yelling, "NO, Little Guy! Leave Mommy's tail alone!"

BAPP! Sabrina, accompanied by muttered obcenities, pops Stosh in the nose and he and Brandy meld into a whump-bump-whump of wrestling on the bedroom floor.

Where is Daddy? Sound asleep, dreaming of a Stanley Cup.

It isn't 5:30AM yet. But it's okay. Brandy kneads me gently, Philip's bulk is comforting; and I don't really care that, after the sky is bright, I'll have a pile of catnip to clean up where an enterprising little person tore the plastic tub open.

Copyright © Baha Singh
October 9, 2008