My glasses! Where are my glasses, Annabelle?
This morning I was crawling around the floor, reaching under the bed, and fighting off panic. Without my glasses, I am not only blind, but I cannot think.
I put my glasses on my night table when I go to bed, but lately Annabelle has become fascinated by their construction. She climbs up on my night table and plays with them. When she’s feeling especially exuberant and successful in wrapping her claws around one of the stems, they may end up tossed anywhere on the floor around my bed. Much as I warn her that she might break them, she never listens. She gets the same pleasure picking up a pencil or clutching the rim of a glass and watching it overturn.
Annabelle?
A blurry gray mass moved at the bottom of my bed.
What?
Oh, good! That was Annabelle I was addressing. It could have been the clothes I wore last night.
Have you seen my glasses?
Did you ask Thatch?
Where was he? I couldn’t see far enough to locate him.
Annabelle! Did you toss my glasses off the nightstand?
Shh! I’m trying to sleep. Bother Thatch
I asked you, Missy, I said, because you’re the one who keeps stealing them.
I am not a thief. Thatch is.
A two-toned blur jumped onto the bed.
That’s not fair, Annabelle, Thatch said. I don’t steal. I collect what I find on the floor.
Thatch, is that you? Do you have Daddy’s glasses?
No.
Do you see them anywhere around the bed?
No.
I watched the blur that was Thatch jump off the bed and wander toward the kitchen area.
Thatch, come back! I could hear my voice rising.
The gray mass moved and walked slowly into my view. When she was six inches from me, I could actually see her.
Where’s your old pair? Annabelle asked me.
I forgot about them!
Put them on, she ordered. You’re beginning to panic. It’s annoying.
I turned to my nightstand, rummaged through a drawer cluttered with things I consider vital to my survival, found the glasses case I had marked “2016” when I got the new pair, and put them on. I sat on the bed and calmed down at once.
Much better, I said, turning back to Annabelle.
She wasn’t there. She was in the kitchen with Thatch. After several minutes of nodding heads in conference, Thatch ran up, stood up on his back legs and grabbed my knee with his front paws.
Daddy? Can you see now?
Hey, Thatch! Don’t you look cute?
We want breakfast. It’s late.
Wait just a second. Now that I can see again, let me find my real glasses. They must be around here somewhere.
And they were.
We all had breakfast, and then I made the bed, tidied up the apartment, and cleaned the litter. Annabelle and I made our building patrol, and then she helped me take the recyclable trash to the basement. She doesn’t like the ghosts lurking there or the numerous scents of the feral cats sheltered there in the winters years before by a former super, but she says she won’t let me go down there unprotected. That’s fine with me; those basement ghosts are mean mothers.
Tonight we watched the 1963 Disney movie The Incredible Journey, which I last saw fifty-five years ago. The three stars – a Siamese cat, a bull terrier, and a Labrador retriever – are excellent, and some of the human cast are not. By the end, the three of us were sobbing. Thatch wants me to read the original book to them. Annabelle wants to star in a remake; she claims she can act Siamese.
Earlier today Amazon delivered several items in a large carton, so she’s now relaxing in her carton, reading Backstage, waiting for stardom, and dreaming of Paris and seeing the world.
Little Thatch, whose dreams are huge as hers but on a smaller domestic scale, suffers from timidity, early childhood scars, and his health. Dreaming in his cat tree, I doubt he will wander far from the safety of home, no matter how much I encourage him to fly or offer to go with him.
I can only support their dreams and ambitions and protect them as much as I possibly can while I can.
You see, I am who they are and they are who I am.
©2018, Larry Moore
Annabelle & Thatch 