Is there a Rosetta lesson for Cat?

Part of me doesn’t even want to mention this, for fear it might jinx something. But BW came home this weekend.

BW is a Sylvester-colored tom-kitty, dapper looking in black with a white chest and white feet. He’s always been a people-kitty, and desperately wanted to be a HIT (Housecat in Training) ever since, as the teensiest kitten, he figured out there was a world beyond the patio door.

He’d slip in, giving new meaning to “silent as cat feet,” and hide away under the dining room table. BW was so quiet and discreet, he was positively invisible.

Pretty soon, we let him have full HIT privileges. He stayed in more than out, lounging around the house, falling in love with our fridge. It was the weirdest thing to see a cat curled up next to our side-by-side, occasionally reaching out a paw and touching the cool metal of the door.

And then one day about a week ago he didn’t come back in. I didn’t worry too much, because tom kitties will roam, and I figured that The Husband had let him in and out without me knowing it.

But when The Husband asked me if I’d seen BW around, I had to admit that I hadn’t. My concern grew and grew as the little fellow didn’t return. The Husband and I would have whispered conversations about it at night, because we didn’t want to upset The Kiddo.

Sunday night, as a storm blew in, I heard this awful yowling. At first I thought it was The Kiddo and The Husband, pretending to be a cat in some weird game called “Let’s-Annoy-Mommy.”

After The Kiddo swore that it was not her, and after I realized the yowling was still carrying on while she was talking (pretty persuasive evidence, there), I opened the front door.

There on the front porch, skinny as a six-o’clock, was BW. He dashed in the house like a pack of Dobermans was after him. He proceeded to eat three bowlfuls of cat food and lap up a small ocean of water.

And then he started yowling again.

I thought maybe he wanted more food. Or more water. Or to go out.

But no. He just wanted to yowl.

Once I decided that he wasn’t sick and he wasn’t hurt and he wasn’t twining his hind legs together in anticipation of a long wait to go outside, I figured it out.

He was telling me all about the privations of being apart from us for a week.

And he told us, all right. Yowl, yowl, yowl, YOWL.

Eventually, after we “listened” to his story, he got settled down, curled up by the fridge, and reached out to touch a paw against the cool metal.

Boy, I sure wish I knew how to speak Cat. The stories BW told me that night – stories that I completely missed.