Author: Mark Myers

I am a husband of one, father of four daughters, a dreamer, a builder, a believer, and most enjoyably a writer. In 2015, I became a reluctant Childhood Cancer Advocate as we lost our youngest daughter Kylie to the disease. Kylie taught me to steal joy from even the worst of circumstances and I will always be on the lookout for happiness among the thorns of life. Join me for a generous helping of laughter and tears.

The Colonel’s First Story, pt. 3

.Reading time 3 minutes.

I have been serializing Colonel Birdwhistle’s first story from the book.  Click here to start at the beginning: Part 1 .

And now, I submit to you Part 3:

He sat for several minutes facing skyward with a peculiar look on his face.  Having lived alongside noise all his military life, he had developed the ability to drown out distractions around him by simply shutting his eyes and focusing on his thoughts.  It was a rare gift really.  He entered this trance while considering what to say next and was half hoping that Leon would wander off.  Finally, an acceptable topic came to mind, and he blurted out the word, “Monkeys!”

The Colonel opened his eyes and looked down to find that his audience had grown.  Instead of one plump boy seated in front of him, there were now a dozen children of all shapes and sizes waiting patiently for him to continue.  Behind them all stood their mothers as interested as their tots, and Mrs. Dobrey was smiling and nodding to him.

“I like monkeys,” said a pig-tailed little girl up front with her hand on his knee.

Surrounded and outnumbered, he continued, “Young lady, you might not like monkeys if there were hundreds of them and they were everywhere.  What was your name?”Colonel on bench

“My name is Sally,” said the little girl with a smile.

“Well Sally, do you like rats?” asked the Colonel.

“Ewwww.  No.  They’re gross.”

“To some degree, in Africa, monkeys are just like rats.  Only they are more intelligent and can get into more trouble because they have these,” he held up one hand and pointed to it with the other.  “There is almost nothing that a group of cute little monkeys can’t steal.  And you know what they want most of all?”

The children said nothing but sat, eyes wide open, waiting for an answer.

“Food.  Just the same as what you and I want,” continued the old man, warming to his story.  “One of the things I had to do was to make sure that all of our men had enough food, right.  Because they couldn’t do anything if they were hungry all the time.  So we had these great big ships that came into port full of food and other supplies, and we would have to unload it and put it on carts that would carry everything to the forward post.  But the monkeys made it terribly hard to get this done because they were everywhere.  There were hundreds of them.  So we decided one time to trap the monkeys and um…” he paused looking slowly around at the innocent faces.  “Um, relocate them to a different area.  Yes, that’s it.”

“If they’re smart, how could you trap them?” asked one of the children.

Part 4

The broken cat

.Reading time 3 minutes.

We forgot the cat again. We didn’t forget to feed her or change her litterbox. No, we forgot to take her to the vet to get her fixed, again. The phone call from my lovely wife went something like this:

LW: Did you make an appointment for the cat?

Me: I knew I forgot something! Did you make one?

LW: No, and she’s doing it again.

Me: What? That’s impossible! She just went through this.

LW holds the phone out so I can listen to the cat moaning her bewitching taunt to any would-be boy cats in a ten mile radius. We talked about it and agreed that it had to happen. With the busyness of life, we just never got around to it. To quote a favorite phrase in our home, we got stuck in the “tyranny of the urgent.” So she hit a cycle for the second time, reminding us of her needs.  Often…and loudly.

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We have two old labs, one we call Toby Flenderson. If you watched The Office, you know Toby is short on personality and so is our dog. She never does much – just lays around and looks at you. She will momentarily spring to life to smell the butt or crotch of a visitor just to embarrass us. But it isn’t long before she lays back down, and looks at you. Well, the cat in heat has decided that Toby must be the one who can satisfy her urges. I don’t know why, perhaps it is because the dog is more dormant than the other one. Regardless of the fact that the dog is spade…and female, the cat has perfected a dance of love designed to woo her.  She flops around in front of the poor pooch all day long trying to seduce her. Worse yet, at night, she calls out to her, waking us up with her songs of love.

She got so desperate yesterday, I think she downloaded some Barry White on iTunes and bought Toby a shot of tequila.

imageWhile most in the house laugh about this, the entire thing has been fermenting in my youngest daughter’s mind. She hasn’t had “the talk” yet. So she doesn’t know why Kitty is doing a low crawl of love across the floor. Oh, the questions! What does ‘in heat’ mean? What is fixed? Is she broken? Why is her bottom in the air? Why does she keep nuzzling Toby?

Since we’re cat newbies, the oldest has been doing research on the topic. Turns out, this might last a while as they can go into heat over and over and over until…well, you get the picture even if our youngest doesn’t.

Guess who’s going to the vet soon?