DOGS, FAT CATS AND JELLY BEANS

I love dogs. Dogs love me. I also love jelly beans. They love me, too, as too many of them cause a bulge around my midsection. I don’t like cats – fat cats, skinny cats: cats. I don’t like them because they don’t like me.

The summer after I graduated from college, I sent several weeks working in a parish on Chicago’s Southside. When I arrived home in late August, I discovered that a big, fat cat (she was pregnant) had made her home on the side of our house, As I walked up the steps carrying my suitcase, the cat, who later became known as Gertrude, was sunning herself on the porch. She took one look at me, hissed, and took off. From that moment on, until I left three weeks later to go back to seminary, she avoided me.

A week after our first encounter, Gertrude gave birth to five offspring. As my Mom told the story, as I walked out the front door, suitcases in hand, Gertrude walked in the back door, litter trailing behind, to make herself at home. And she did for the next ten years. Every time I returned home from seminary or for a visit after ordination, I somehow knew I was doing so with Gertrude’s grudging permission.

I truly have nothing against cats. God must have had a good reason to create them, perhaps only to torment me and those of my ilk. Now, lest I incur the wrath of half the population, and especially my little sister who adores them, let me hasten to add that there is probably an internal reason why cats and I don’t get along: after three days in the same house with a cat, I acquire The Cat’s Revenge: my eyes water and my nose runs.

None of this happens with dogs. Dogs don’t make my eyes water and don’t put on pounds like jelly beans. It’s like the problem of evil: how can a good God create something good (a cat) that will cause a good person (me) to not get along? The answer? Beats me!

The reason why cats and I don’t get along should be the least of my worries. What I should really worry about is not why I like dogs and cats don’t like me. What I should worry about are those jelly beans: not why I love them (why not?), but why I eat too many of them when I know I should not.

The love-dog, hate-cat problem is beyond my control. I can’t help it if I like dogs and I can’t stop my nose from running while around cats for too long a time. But I can stop eating all those jelly beans. It is that which is under my control and which I do not maintain control that is my real worry, or should be.

All this is simply a reminder that if you are like me, we often worry more about that over which we have no control and less about the over which we do. And that over which we do is what usually gets us into trouble. We need to worry about that!