Given the strange behavior of my cats today, it is my belief that they have located, captured, and probably eaten a bug beneath my bed. This produces mixed emotions in me. First: Joy. (Ding dong the bug is dead!) Second: Disgust. (Eww! A bug was lurking beneath where I sleep, helpless all night, in a space where I have significant problems cleaning.)
None of these emotions are related to my cats and their omnivorous lifestyle. They're cats. Other than being cute and cuddly, the location and harassment of all house-bound insects is their top function.
But my fears that the cats' odd-even-for-them behavior is, in fact, related to this top function, may be over inflated. But for good reason.
Earlier this week I was reading in bed. (Oh yes, you can see where this story is going.) I way lying on my stomach, pillow scrunched up under my torso to help prop me up, and my book was leaning against the headboard to help prop it up. It was in this position, with my head so close to the edge of the mattress, that a creature of the six-legged variety crawled up over the edge of the mattress, progressed forward another two inches topside, then stopped and waved its freakish antennae at me. Since my face was no more than eight or twelve inches away from this salutation, I back peddled quickly.
The very neighborly bug who'd dropped by to say hi, did not survive the encounter.
Yet I remained freaked out. What if I'd been reading in a different position when that happened? I would never have noticed his approach. What If I'd been lying in bed, using the pillow like normal people do? Would my now dead neighbor have crawled right up over the side of the mattress and continued his course beneath the pillow? Would I have made his acquaintance not at a socially acceptably twelve inches but a mere two as I sleepily batted my lashes? The thought, however melodramatic, is not to be born.
