Monday, March 06, 2006

Being Called to Bed


It was almost ten o'clock tonight, just about an hour ago. The Cupster and I were sitting downstairs in the living room watching Words Into Music, a documentary about the recent inductees into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. We were watching the segment about Leonard Cohen, which k.d. lang would finish with her rather sensational rendition of Cohen's Hallelujah.


It was then that one green eye peeked around the stairs, and it was then that the cat meowed at us.


This was neither a general nor indiscriminate meow, doncha know? No, it was the cat's call to bed. As I have previously mentioned, we generally all go to bed together, and he is beginning to let us know in no uncertain terms if he is ready for bed but we appear not to be. That's right, Mr Cat has taken to meowing to us that it is time to trundle off to bed. Just the other night, he sat at the bottom of the stairs, plaintively looking upwards, and insistently beckoning us with his meows.


Tonight, when he repeated the behaviour, from part-way up the stairs this time, we knew that it had been no fluke. After about five minutes, he tired of waiting and headed the rest of the way without us. Sure enough, we found him hunkered down at the foot of the bed when we ascended the stairs and poked our noses in the bedroom doorway a few minutes later.


I suppose that his calls were rewarded because a tired Cupster soon joined him. Normally, I go to bed with Cupster and read to her for a while. But we just finished a book and don't have another at hand. Any suggestions?


(There are two more cat photos that you might have missed on The Cupster's blog.)


 

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

The photo tells the story :-). Funny how they know. I used to have a little Lhasa that would bark at the foot of the stairs telling me the same thing. Your story brought back many wonderful memories of my old girl.

Ginger said...

How cute! You always know who's the boss in a cat's house. :)

methatiam said...

We used to have four dogs who would crowd in the bed with us every night (thank goodness for king-size beds). I remember the day I realized that I spent way too much time watching the TV; I turned it off one afternoon and all four dogs got up and trundled into the bedroom.

Judy said...

My dog used to sit under my computer desk. When the AOL voice said "Good-bye" she would get up and go into the bedroom. She'd look over her should at me, like 'come on!, the guy said goodbye!'

Now she's deaf, but it was sure fun while it lasted.

Valerie - Still Riding Forward said...

You better remind his highness who is boss now, or you will be bottom rung pack members in no time, subject to his every whim from kibbles to kombing...LOL

TOO LATE!

Bonita said...

What a gift to read together at bedtime - I'd recommend "Holding Onto The Grass" by William Stafford. It is the most restful, exquisite poetry about nature. I think both of you would enjoy it.

Anonymous said...

I just finished reading a book that a friend loaned to me that I could not put down. It is titled "Alas, Babylon" and was published in 1959, a work of fiction. The author is Pat Frank. Now the subject matter may not sound appealing for bedtime reading, but hold your judgement. It deals with a nuclear holocaust at the height of the Cold War. It mainly tells of how the survivors cope with the aftermath. The book is interesting on several levels, the reasons that the war starts is the Middle East, and the similarities to the state of the world today are striking. But the part I most enjoyed was the depiction of what life would be like without all the comforts we have grown accustomed to. In some ways the book reminds me of Stephen King's "The Stand", another of my favorites.

Darlene said...

Our cat has become quite communicative, too--and what's weird is that all the time he was growing up, when we had one or two other cats at the same time, we always wondered if he could meow. Only occasionally would he give a squeak. Now he tells us when he wants to go out (goes to the door and meows), when he wants some human food (goes to the refrigerator and meows), when he wants to play (he meows, darts into the other room and meows again from there). He even meows when he wants to be petted, and the list is growing. It's such a wonderful feeling that not only is he telling us what he wants and assumes that we understand, but the fact that we have learned to understand him.

Sue said...

One of our cats lets us know when it's lunchtime too, and complains if we start late. She rushes around making sure everyone's here, and tells us all what to do. She's the most vocal of our cats and has several distinctly different mews that let us know what she wants. One of them, when she wants to go out, sounds uncannily like the word 'out' - sort of 'OWWww' - it used to be accompanied by patting the door or window handle until we learned to understand it. Cats must think humans are very slow, sometimes...

Annie said...

I just LOVE cats! They are so great! :)

Lora said...

Meow. Just another way of letting you know whose really in charge in your household.