Catwoman I'm Not

I'm allergic to onions, bananas, and cats. I'm careful to avoid all of them in my diet. I'm not allergic to coconut, artificial cheese-flavored alleged food products, or black jelly beans, but I would be if I could. I'm equally careful to avoid them in my diet. You don't want to know why I have these intense aversions, but I will say that two of them involve chain-reaction carsickness on hot vinyl backseats.

Back when I still lived in "the house" with the boys, we were visited by Danger Kitties. I hadn't thought about the Danger Kitties in years. They kept trying to climb the screen of our sliding patio door, and would get stuck several feet off the ground, and mewl at surprising volume until unhooked from the screen.

The Danger Kitties were born in the rotting storage shed across the alley. The Boat Boys who lived in that house were oblivious to the presence of feral cats in their shed. The Boat Boys used to sit out in the large motor boat parked in their driveway, drinking beer and listening to loud music. One morning I got all three boys buckled into the Mazda MPV minivan, opened the garage door, started backing out to drive them to school, and found the motor boat blocking the alley. No Boat Boys were home, of course, only feral Danger Kitties incapable of moving the motor boat. Hadn't thought about that particular weirdness in years.

My youngest is in the college scholarship savage jungle hunt. It's part tsetse flies, and part high stakes Texas hold-em poker. We have to play the odds to hit the big money. He's the third child of divorced parents. If you think there's a big chunk of wisely-invested college savings socked away for him, you would be seriously deluded.

In fairy tales it is often the third son who manages to convert the inheritance of a cat and a burlap bag into marriage to the king's beautiful daughter. This son will land on his feet wherever life throws him. He will respond to my anxieties and micromanaging with smug detachment from the warm hearth in front of his computer screen. He will trick the giant into becoming a mouse, and charm the miller's daughter into driving him around town in her dad's new Mini Cooper. Plus, he will have thick, luxurious hair without even earning it. He's already clawed up the couch, and I still let him live here.