Cats are people, too

That’s all I’m getting. The rest of the re-orientation into the Twilight Zone that is Moving Back in With My Parents is focused on Cody the cat, who she recently diagnosed as depressed, because more and more cats are these days. Dr. Phil said so last week on Oprah. (About cats, Mom? "No, about people, but whatever, cat’s are people, too!" she had said without a shred of irony, sarcasm, or lucidity.) She insisted the vet help with a prescription. Mom is fifty-something, but she’s talking in her usual baby voice, kind of like Anna Nicole Smith but more like a crazy homeless sailor, played by Debbie Reynolds. She tells me that Cocoa is just too quiet and scared. “Well, just look,” she exclaims. “She’s hiding now as we speak!”

I see Cody from behind a fake plant under one of the limited edition framed Thomas Kincaid lithographs hanging on display in the garage.

"There’s a new person here,” Mom mumbles to me, explaining Cody’s antics and she says “new person” in a way that implies that Cody the cat was the last new person to be invited into the house, “That’s why she’s acting so weird toward you,” Mom says.
Weird in this house is relative.

Mom thinks I’m weird, too, I remember, because the last time I came home to visit, at Christmas in 2002, she noticed my diet had changed. "I'm sorry Cocoa Butt; your new brother doesn't want to play with you right now because he'd rather go to some crazy health food store called Trader Joe's,” she mimics with a bitterly high-fallutin’ accent. “To buy Soy Milk? What's that, Cody,” She leans into Cody’s ear to hear her thoughts, “I know. You can't milk a Soy." She had said, agreeing with her cat.

I notice a tear run down mom’s face now as I walk a box into the living room, and then she shivers a little and sits down on the sofa. She’s crying. I sit down next to her.

“Please don’t plop down on this couch” Mom says through tears, “It’ll break and we’ll have to buy a new one.”