Tripod and His Sandbox

There are certain instances in my life that let me know that I am a grown up.  I fight it tooth and nail but there is no going back to the time of grunge rock and fraternity parties.  I am a different person than I was in the 90’s.  I am married and I have a career, two hallmarks of the American adult.  I also have a three-legged cat.

Tucker, as we call him, does everything a normal cat can do.  He’s missing his back left leg though so when he walks, he kind of zig-zags but I prefer to look at that as swagger.  The only time I ever really know he has this disability though, is when his left ear itches.  He assumes the “I need to scratch my ear” position but nothing happens except that you see his little motor running inside his fur where his leg use to be.  We do our best to run and scratch the ear but sometimes we are overcome and we laugh, point and stare. We then feel guilty.  The motor just keeps on running.

Owning a cat brings with it litter box duty.  I strongly dislike litter box duty because I have to shovel out clumps of tee tee and they smell yucky.  Much to our dismay and disgust, the doo doo is usually taken care of by the dogs but I have absolutely no desire to talk about that here lest my weak stomach starts to get the better of me and I lose my man card again.  As I’ve grown a little older, I realize that for some reason, I really like going to the grocery store and I have no idea why.  We ran out of cat littler and I enthusiastically volunteered to run to the store because it would give me a chance to grab some dishwasher soap that we needed so badly.  How can a man be a man without clean dishes?

I parked a good distance from the door because the closest spots are reserved for golf carts and hybrid vehicles, basically soccer moms that like to shop in tennis skirts and bring lots of kids.  I parked far away from the front door in a spot reserved for us common folk and made my sojourn toward the entrance.  I grabbed a hand basket because I only needed a couple of things to go with my litter.  I get to the pet aisle and looked for my brand.  This is not my first rodeo; I have a cat litter brand.  Upon locating this box of joy, my day got even brighter because next to the price tag was the little red and gold sticker alerting me that this was a buy one get one free product with my discount card.  This guy does not go anywhere without his discount card. 

 If I knew this was going to happen, I would have grabbed a shopping cart instead of just a hand basket.  I had to do some rather extreme contorting to carry a basket and two boxes of cat litter but I made do.  The check out guy gave me a weird look because I was obviously a big fan of this litter.  I’ll sacrifice a little pride in the name of saving money.  I walked out of that store double fisting my golden boxes of glorified sand and caught more than a few stares from my fellow consumers.  I share a kindred spirit with the cat ladies of the world and I hope I can carry the banner well.  For today, I made my little tripod happy because he could now go number one in a clean box. 

Isn’t that all we really want out of life?