YESTERDAY I took a bath. Doesn’t sound like much, but it was quite a treat.
I’m staying in a hotel room in Chicago, and there’s a tub here.
I have a tub at home but can never use it, because Snow White, our infantile rescue cat, who wasn’t fully weaned as a kitten, is always sh*tting in our bathtub and p*ssing on our bathroom floor. She has a litter box, and I keep it clean, but that doesn’t matter to her.
Because she was not weaned, she goes through the motions of an adult cat without understanding what they mean—like a Catholic reciting Mass before Vatican II. For instance, after she p*sses on the floor, she bats sand from the litter box all over the floor as well. She knows that sand batting follows p*ssing. She just doesn’t know why. It’s clear to me that her mother tried to teach her how to use a litter box, but she was taken away before the lesson stuck.
To keep our tub at home somewhat clean, I plug it and keep it filled with water. Since cats don’t like water, Snow White refrains from jumping into the tub and sh*tting in it. But the tub is always filled with cold water, which grows dirty over time. You’d think I could drain the tub and bathe in it. But, no.
The tub is hard to plug. Most times, the plug doesn’t work. If I unplug the drain to run a fresh bath, the plug won’t re-plug … water drains silently from the tub, and, while I sleep my innocent sleep, Snow White hops back into the tub and fills it with sh*t. The aromatic, meaty sh*t of cats.
The only way to stop her is to keep the tub plugged and never ever use it. If I think about this, it’s such an overwrought metaphor for so many blocked things in my life, I could scream and never stop.
Instead, I take baths in hotels, when I can, and count myself a lucky fella.
