The Brown Thing

One of my all-time fav movies is Christmas Vacation with Chevy Chase. Everybody has seen it so I won't post a recap of the thing, but just know it was a good movie. The scene with the squirrel and the dog running through the house, knocking stuff over and scaring the bejeebers out of the Christmas dinner guests was a crazy-funny thing to watch.

Everybody thinks that particular scene couldn't happen in real life, but it happened to me. It really did.

It was about ten years ago and I sort of stumbled into it. My marriage bed co-habitant owned two cats at the time that I hated, and somewhat coincidentally, they hated me back. We never got along, but we made a silent pact of mutually assured destruction, sort of like the US and the Russians did in the cold war. I didn't drown them and they treated me like an old, uncomfortable chair that nobody sits in. They ignored me.

Preamble -Night One

So one night, I went to go get into bed at maybe ten or whatever time it was. I pulled the covers back, slid into my spot, reached back and adjusted my two pillows a little better to fit my sensitive melon, then I noticed the cats. They were watching me. They didn't move a muscle, they just sat by the bed and stared. They didn't blink, they just looked at me with their evil cat-eyes, not flinching, just waiting for something to happen. I thought they were waiting for me to die. I grabbed one of the little pillows that has no purpose but lives on my bed and I threw it at the cats. I missed. Stupid cats, I promised myself that tomorrow, as soon as I woke up, they would die in pain and agony, but for next eight hours I would ignore their cat-shenanigans. 

I tried to go to sleep. I was tired. I wanted to go to sleep, but those cats were merciless. The cat-loving spouse said she thought the cats were smarter than I was and maybe they brought a bird in, so we looked under the bed. We looked behind the bed. We looked in the closet. We looked everywhere. For two hours we looked. Sometimes the cats followed us, sometimes they left the room, but they were always back in a few seconds. Waiting. Watching. Judging. Something was wrong, but I couldn't figure out what, so I get into bed, pick up the top pillow and try to adjust it when something brown and fast explodes from between my top pillow and my bottom pillow, bounces once off my shoulder and launched into the closet, one claw width in front of the murderous, vile cats. My wife screams for help. The cats scream for blood. The dog tucks tail and runs into the kitchen, whining like the chicken-dog he is. The only thing that calms that dog down is when he digs through the garbage can for scraps, so he does that. It's 1.00AM and with all the noise and swearing, it woke my son so he shows up sporting his tidy-whities and a baseball bat, ready to defend the family.

We spend the next hour in the closet, digging through shoes and shirts and clothes, looking for the brown-thing. Nothing. It was too late and I was too tired to find the brown-thing, so we sent the boy back to bed with his bat and the wife and I slept in the spare bedroom while the cats sat in my closet, staring at my shirts on hangers.

The next day, we went our separate ways. The boy went to school, the wife and I went to work, the cats took up guard duty and watched my shirts in the closet. The dog was made of sterner stuff, so he kept up his garbage can patrol against the brown-thing, comforted with the knowledge that dinner scraps were only twelve hours away.

The War- Night Two

The next night, after the family was home from work and school, we approached the closet much like Wyatt Earp and his family must have approached the OK corral. The winner and the loser were as yet undecided, but one way or another, the battle would come to a close. No quarter was given, nor was it requested. The smell of death was in the air.

The cats took up sentry duty, ready to slash any combatant trying to flee the battleground. The dog stayed in the kitchen with the garbage can, protecting it from the brown-thing. I settled on a seven iron after the driver proved too long to swing. My son brought his baseball bat and a lid to the new frypan. My wife was unarmed.

We slid one shirt at a time on the clothes hanger-pole, looking between the shirts for the intruder. We found it in seconds. It sat there, unmoving. It had disproportionately large eyeballs and flaps of skin between the front and back legs. It stared at me, bravely waiting for my coup-de-grace, my killing stroke. I couldn't do it. The mess would be catastrophic, besides, it was afraid. It might have been shivering.  It just stared at me with those bug-eyes.  I couldn't kill it.  My son proved his worth by slapping the frypan lid down over the brown-thing that looked vaguely like Rocky, the Flying Squirrel. The cats started to jump up and claw my shirts. I sent the wife for a cookie sheet, which we slid under the fry-pan lid, thereby imprisoning the dangerous, toothy beast. We walked out onto the deck, me holding the cookie sheet, the boy holding firm the fry-pan lid. On the count of three, the boy unlidded the brown-thing and I flicked the cookie sheet up, dislodging the prisoner. It spread it's legs like a working girl and gracefully glided down to the lawn, then ran behind the bush.

Prologue

I don't know what became of the brown-thing, I never saw it again. I hope it ran home safely and lived a full life, with a family of his own, in a safe place, with plenty of nuts to eat and without evil cats chasing it. I hope.

I rode fifty four miles today. I got dropped twice in the first thirty minutes, and once in the last thirty. That is a thing I live with these days. Tomorrow I run.