Why I don't have a pet any more, part two.

Digit. My daughter and her dad were taking joint Hebrew lessons. One day their teacher said she was making aliyah to Israel and would not be able to take her cat with her, so would we keep it? Emigrating to Israel sounded so noble. Melina's dad said yes.

As it turned out, the Hebrew teacher did not go to Israel, she just went to Maryland. But she didn't want the cat back. Maybe she just went to get away from her cat.

Digit was the stupidest cat I have ever known. Sweet and dull, she landed with a grunt when she left her chair (actually my chair, the cushion all covered with her awful matted grey hairs) to walk to her food bowl. Then she reversed the process. This is all she did, ever.

When she got her paw stuck in something (like the door weatherstripping), she couldn't ever figure out how to extricate it and would just stand there waiting pitifully for somebody to save her.

She was like those koala bears - so stupid they eat their way out to the tips of the eucalyptus branches and then can't figure out how to get back, so the park rangers have to go around plucking them off empty branches and putting them on branches that still have leaves. What? Are you telling me my aunt made up that story?

Let's talk about Digit's awful, long grey fur, which she shed constantly. This was her only hobby. Her fuzz rose in the air in huge fluffy tumbleweeds. It matted on every surface and found its way into every nostril. It was extruded from her body in massive quantities and detached itself and drifted off her onto the floor, 24 hours a day. It was up on the ceiling in clumps and singlets. It was circling the hot air vents.

We combed her frequently; the fuzz carded out of her pelt was so copious it appeared to be a raw material which should be utilized. We tried spinning yarn out of it, we tried making felt out of it, but everything we made was the color of a rat, and un-useful.

Slack off the cat-grooming for a couple days and Digit had intractable tangles. The tangles under her tail were brown, odorous, and hardened as she did not comprehend cat hygeine. Also, as mentioned before, she was intractably incontinent.

Digit wandered off into the woods one day and never came back. My son mourned her, as she was very sweet. She never asked for much, just my chair and a foodbowl.