Kitty Alarm
I am convinced that my cat, Posey, knows how to tell time.
On any given weekday morning, my alarm is set for 5 a.m. This is meant to give me an hour to wake up, have a cup or two of coffee, glance at the paper, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever other mindless distraction I might stumble across in my half-awake state and begin to get ready for the morning rush. As the clock clicks over from 4:59 to 5:00 and the beep-beep-beep-beep sounds, I instinctively fling a hand out and smack the snooze button for nine more minutes of dozing and drifting. (I bargain with myself that I don’t need to check Facebook and that buys me the slice of time I am now stealing from my hour.)
At 5:07, just as the drifting gets nice and cozy and dreamy, Posey lets out a questioning, “Mhrr?” I shush her, and try to recapture the drifty-dozey feeling. At 5:08 she interrupts with another, more insistent “Mhrr?” Again, I shush her and turn over to settle more comfortably into a doze. One minute later–Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Posey gives a little kitty grunt of satisfaction and lightly claws the loveseat as encouragement for me to fully wake up. She then races downstairs to stand expectantly at her food dish.
Lest you think that she is merely trying to get me up so that I, having opposable thumbs, can feed her poor hungry self, I would like to present the following evidence: She is fed at 4:30, when Matt gets up. (He does not hit snooze, because he’s all disciplined like that. Whatever. Although I should also add in the interest of being entirely fair and honest that I do, indeed, scoop up some food for her when I get downstairs, because she’s eaten a small dent in the previous scoopful and now can see the bottom of the bowl and is clearly mistreated and close to starvation. Also, I am apparently trained.)
Here’s where it gets spooky: On weekends, when the alarm is not set, she is perfectly content to wait until she senses with her kitty magic that we are possibly approaching consciousness and then she does her “mhrr?” routine. And on those random holiday Mondays, where we don’t have to set the alarm but it’s clearly a weekday? 5:07, alarm or no alarm, we get a questioning, “Mhrr?”
It’s not just waking up that she is attuned to. She also likes to jump up into my lap approximately five minutes before I, myself, realize that I need to pee, leave the house, or even that the phone is going to ring. This is so she can jump off in indignation at the interruption, often with a baleful look at me for daring to have a need that interferes with her comfort, which is suspiciously assuaged by offering to fluff her food dish. (For those of you without cats, this is stirring up the cat food so that it looks all piled up and the bottom of the bowl is not in danger of showing, thereby threatening starvation and neglect. The fluffing is supervised by the cat, and a “mhrr” of grudging approval is given. This is recognized by both parties as an admission of guilt on the part of the owner.)
Matt and I usually head up to bed around 9:30, and if we stray from that – say by daring to watch another 15 minutes of a show we taped six days earlier and haven’t had time to watch – she begins to make impatient “mhrr!” sounds to remind us of the time. When she realizes we are doing the nighttime routine of turning off lights, etc., she races ahead of us to flop on our bathroom floor, all the better to supervise the brushing of teeth and washing of faces. Two minutes before we finish, she races to the bed to stare at us, awaiting the fifteen minutes or so that we read before lights out. Two minutes before the lights go out she settles noisily, her back to us, setting her internal alarm for 5:07 a.m., all the better to keep me on track.
Sigh…
