silver

Alas, this took place before the days of phone cameras, but let me tell you about the time I was visiting my folks for dinner not long after I'd gotten my own place.

They had a cat who went into depression after I moved out, stopped eating, and I'd have to call her on the phone to cheer her up. Seriously. Anyway she had gotten over it but now was very spoiled because Mom had hand-fed her from the table.

She'd stand up on tippy-toes and grab Mom's hand with a forkful of food and inspect it. When Mom's plate was empty, she moved on to me. “All I have left are Brussels sprouts,” I told her, and only the nasty bitter ones (fun fact: modern sprouts have been bred to not do that, which I only recently discovered. I like sprouts but they used to be a real gamble).

She continued to pester, and finally I was like “fine, if you're sure.” Parents' kitchen had carpet (wut) so I took one of those little shallow plastic baskets and inverted it on the floor, and put half a sprout on it. She sniffed it, patted it with her paw, sniffed it again, patted it a little harder. We were all trying not to giggle so loud she stopped, but she was FOCUSED on that sprout.

And then she crouched down, did that thing where the ears go flat to the sides so the sprout couldn't see her over the basket edge... and then reached up and just WHACKWHACKWHACK proceeded to slap the living daylights out of that Brussels sprout. We were choking on laughter by then.

Now, Mom believed in cooking vegetables thoroughly, so pretty soon that sprout was just a fine green paste across the bottom of the basket. BUT SHE WAS NOT DONE. Having determined that it was now safe, she stood up to inspect her work but oh NO, her paw was icky. So she licked it clean... and then proceeded to lick up every last bit of sprout paste off the bottom of that basket.