SWEET BIPPY

Way back when the world was still black and white, DH and I got married.

Then we got a cat. I don’t know why, we just did.  She was a Siamese and we called her Bippy as in, “You bet your sweet bippy.”  Well, we called her that but, although she had amazingly keen hearing, she never answered to her name.

We lived in a cinder-brick duplex on a very busy street so we didn’t dare let our cat outside.  We got the great idea of putting a little dog harness on her so we could take her for walks.  Her reaction was to immediately lie down in the gutter and stay there.  Even when we dragged her she wouldn’t get up.  This was great entertainment for our neighbors.  DH said it was too bad the couple in the other side of the duplex didn’t have a cat too so we could have drag races.

No, our neighbors had a scruffy little dog named Muffin.  They let him run around in our back yard.  When we turned Bippy loose back there she beat up Muffin.  So we had put on her harness and tie her leash on to the clothesline so she could run up and down but not beat up the dog.

Sometimes she escaped out the front door.  She would only do this when we were in our pajamas so we would have to chase her across the busy street and all over the nearby golf course.  She loved watching DH running around wearing his plaid p.j. pants on the driving range in the dark screaming, “Bippy! Bippy!”  She was evil but she had a sense of humor.

Anything on the floor was her cat toy.  Anything not on the floor yet would soon be there.  I had a fish bowl terrarium filled with cactus we got as a souvenir from the Grand Canyon.  While we were at work she would paw out the little round cactus and roll them all over the carpet making certain to leave them where bare feet could find them

She expected to be fed as soon as the eastern sky began to get light.  She had no snooze button. When we went to the bathroom she’d poke her paws under the door.  Since I had nothing better to do while I was sitting there I’d unroll a hunk of toilet paper and let her grab for it.  Sometimes this game went on long after I’d flushed.  We were both easily entertained. 

She never let us to forget she was a descendant of Egyptian gods. She allowed us to amuse her as long as we kept her water clean and her food fresh. She only used her litter box when we sat down to eat. When DH was drafted into the army during the Vietnam War and I was finally able to join him at Ft. Lewis, Washington, Bippy became queen in residence on my parents’ dairy farm.  Their barn cats never forgave me.