Have you ever noticed how your pets have a tendency to let you know when they don't care for your current "significant other?"

So it is with my cat, Midnite.

"Lynelle, what is WRONG with this cat?" one date nervously asked from the living room.

"What do you mean?" I unknowingly called from the bathroom where I was finishing up getting ready for the evening out.

"He's standing there, staring at me and hissing!"

"OH."

That one didn't last long, though I didn't get the hint at first, as I should have. Midnite was far more perceptive than I. He never did warm up to the guy -- in fact, after that night, the battle lines were clearly drawn.

Every time they were in each other's presence, Midnite arched his back and hissed and the suitor sat down nervously and didn't budge.

He swore the cat was possessed.

"All he does is hiss at me... and he's black." I suppose this explained it in a nutshell according to his limited viewpoint. Not for me -- I would eventually realize Midnite was simply highly intuitive.

Take for example, a year or two later when I brought another prospective suitor to my home.

As he was getting up from the couch where we had been sitting watching a movie, his first wrong move of the evening was to put his tennis shoes on.

SQUISH... went his shoe.

"What the heck?!" he asked.

A quick sniff of the contents quickly revealed the pungent answer and I almost had a mess of his stomach bile to go right alongside the shoe filled with, you guessed it, cat urine.

"OH MY GOSH!" he yelled as he jumped up holding his nose and emptied the contents outside as I laughed uncontrollably.

Yes, I admit it, I was beside myself in fits of giggles while he took off his now soaking wet sock and his other sock (I suppose he figured he should be fashionably coordinated) and did a frigid tap dance to his SUV in the upstate New York foot-high snow, barefoot -- by romantic moonlight, no less.

We didn't last long after that either. Last I heard, he put the shoe in his dishwasher to try and remove the odor.

In my mind, I could almost hear Midnite saying, "A guy's gotta' do what a guy's gotta' do", while he contentedly licked his paws and waited for his next unsuspecting victim.

Who needs a guard dog with a cat like him?

Copyright © Lynelle M. Dawson, 2001