Sheila, the Uncurious Cat

   

    The phrase ‘curiosity killed the cat’ never made sense to me.  The only cat we were allowed to have, Sheila, was the most uninterested cat in the world.  This provided countless hours of boredom for my brother and me.  We had perseverance though.

    First, we brought out the yarn. As it dangled in front of Sheila, she looked up at us with eyes that said, “Do I look stupid?”

    My brother thought maybe she was a visual learner, so we rolled a toothpick back and forth to each other with our noses.  Sheila twitched an ear as if wondering how many paint chips we'd eaten.

    We turned off the lights and lit up the room with Dad’s flashlight.  While it entertained my baby sister for an hour, Sheila covered her eyes with her paw as though we were disturbing her important thoughts.

    Nothing worked, not catnip, rubber mice, nor bouncy balls.  Eventually, we gave up, and let Sheila be a bump on a log.  She became my mother’s cat.  Sheila would lie in her lap while mother read to us.  I guess we loved Sheila, the way you love your crazy cousin Lou.  You love him because he’s part of the family, but you just don’t quite get why he believes he’s a goat.

    Living on a farm as we did, you have quite a few deaths of pets, and you don’t always know the reason.  Sadly, the day came when we had to bury Sheila in our pet cemetery.  After some loving words said by Mother, my brother and I carefully put the flag we made on the grave.  It waved proudly with words we had written carefully on it, “Here lies Sheila. Curiosity definitely did not kill this cat!”

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