Photo by Ivan Cortez on Unsplash
There is a good reason that you don’t see cats in a Barbershop. I just happen to know why.
Last night Bru asked for a haircut. He keeps his hair fairly short – he has a surgery scar on his head – he’s had 3 surgeries so there is a combination of hair that grows spikey and hair that doesn’t grow at all on his frontal lobe area. I am in charge of haircuts for both cats and him too.
Last night I broke out a new hair cutting set. Nothing exciting, just a black plastic box with all of the cutting guides in plastic bags, the hair cutting tool and another plastic bag with scissors, hair clips, oil and a comb.
When the box snapped open, I heard a rustling underneath the blanket in the livingroom. As I opened the bags containing the guides, I heard more rustling from the back of the house, more like a little bell jingling, and before I knew it, Abby was on the counter checking out the contents of the hair cutting kit.
This isn’t a big problem because Abby is delicate and fine-boned. She certainly didn’t belong there, but she was curious and I get that. I let her stay while I was checking things over. Once she had finished snooping, she sat quietly on the counter, to the side, to watch the festivities.
The WHUMP is what worried me. That was THE HEIFER coming in for a landing on the counter, here to inspect the goings-on. When I call her the Ballerina I am mostly being sarcastic. She hasn’t had a lesson in her life. She rumbled over to the plastic box to see what was going on and managed to move stuff around, drop stuff on the floor and just generally get in the way of everything I had accomplished.
I lifted her up to the second tier of the counter and she promptly stepped right down again. Lifted her up. Back down. So I put her on the floor. It was at this point that Abby realized that there must be something of value in the stuff I was opening, so she came back to look some more.
I delegated her back to the floor as well and that was that. Now let’s not forget that Reggie was sitting on his cage door right there too but he was not a major player in this one. He tossed in a couple of “Whacha doin’s” but for the most part, he could have gone either way. If there had been screams of pain and maybe some blood, he’s your man, but things were a bit too sedate for him so he was barely interested. If he were an Entrepreneur on the Shark Tank, he’d be Out.
So, I grabbed what I needed and crossed the kitchen to start the haircut. The best way to do it is for Bru to pretty much trap me into a small triangle space with his wheelchair, which gives me enough room to move, enough cord to work with, but no escape. Sort of sums up life in general, really.
I start at the back and as I am making that all too crucial horizontal edge that everyone will be able to see I hear this little bell and see out of the corner of my eye a furry object land on the counter across the kitchen. Where all of the haircutting supplies are. In the plastic kit. That is sitting wide open. While I am trapped. With a live haircutting instrument in my hand. Making the crucial horizontal cut.
We all freeze. Bru was frozen anyway, mostly out of fear. I freeze and I stare into Abby’s eyes. She freezes and stares directly back into mine. She pushes her paw. I say DON’T YOU DARE. She pushes some more and the case moves. NO. I try to push the wheelchair but the brakes are on. She pushes a little bit more, all the while her stinky little eyes have not left mine and my eyes have not left hers. Bru is dozing. She gives the final push and the kit goes over the edge, onto the floor and all of the pieces scatter. She scatters too. She’s gone. I heave over, release the brake on one side, move the wheelchair over enough to get out and I round the corner, but there’s nothing but fur slowly wafting in the air.
I am out of breath and wheezing. No wait, that’s Bru. He is snoring lightly. I’m okay. I check a few obvious hiding places and she’s nowhere to be found. I come back and pick up the pieces and put everything on the counter beside me.
Reggie has perked up considerably but has settled down now that no one is forming a posse to get Abby and bring her back to town.
THE HEIFER has slept through it all on the back of the couch but likely knows exactly where the little criminal is hiding. She’s not talking and I’m too tired to negotiate.
We get back to the haircut and I get back to work. Bru asks if someone came to the door or something. I say NOPE – YOU PROBABLY HEARD ABBY – SHE CAME BY. I finish up the back, hit the top, go for the ears, (as an aside, I have a theory that the more hair a man has growing out of his ears, the more weather channels he subscribes to. So I always shave a few of Bru’s off. I take one off and say – THERE GOES DAVID SPENCE – HAH and so on), I wrangle the odd eyebrow hair, and we’re done.
Later, when everything is put away and everyone is back to what they were doing, the fuzzball comes into the office and bangs the door against the desk, scaring me on top of everything else she’s done. She wants in my lap, so I call her over and we cuddle – her laying there upside down in my lap, snoring and me looking down at her, feeling around her ears to see where she hides her stinky little devil horns.