Walk a Little Faster, Dear

I have confessed here often that I am not a cat person. Not so crazy about these animals that, I have heard, will try to kill babies by SUCKING THEIR BREATH. (Okay, maybe that isn't so true, but would the internet have gone to the trouble of making it up if there weren't at least some truth in it? I didn't think so.)

As I've gotten older, though, I've gotten softer. I've even been known to pet a cat and think "Huh, this thing is really soft." And last week when we were in the state of mind also known as Iowa, I even sat for a few heady moments with a cat in my lap as I rocked and stared out the window.

I know! Who is this person?

It was in this beneficent state of mind that I turned the corner on my exercise-cool-down-lap-around-the-block this morning and saw a cat hopping down from the step that leads up into our back door. Small College is just across the street, and because its mascot is a black cat (really!) I felt a thrill of excitement that I had been visited by school pride.

And then.

Then I noticed that this black cat was not our school's live-in mascot, but was instead something almost the same but entirely different, which is to say it was this:

I t'ot I taw a Puddy Tat but instead I taw Pepe Le Pew.

And while I'm as much a Looney Tunes fan as anyone in the world (my children grew up thinking that Bugs Bunny wrote The Barber of Seville) revisiting cartoons of Pepe LePew make me realize that hmmm, he was kind of creepy, which is the ONLY reason I turned around and speed-walked the opposite direction.

It was a cultural statement.