The Other White Meat

So Much to Be Thankful For

I am thankful for porta-johns. Indoor plumbing is an absolute blessing. Laundry detergent is a miracle. A clean bed and a pillow is Heaven. My wife is okay, too. And my kids deserve mention.

Happy Thanksgiving!

My wife is thankful for her three cats. She claims that one of them is mine: the worst one, of course. The one with the most cattitude. The one we feed pork (cheaper than cat food) because it is the only thing she doesn’t immediately puke onto the nearest rug.

I am thankful for cheap, washable rugs.

Back when my wife, Kelli, was my girlfriend, she entrusted me for a time with care of her two cats. (I later picked up cat number three in a bar.) That was when we accidentally discovered the tortoiseshell cat’s affinity for pork. We might never have known if I hadn’t been so faithful to Kelli’s cat-care instructions.

Her instructions: “Don’t spoil those cats with people food. All they need is their dry cat food and water.”

That was fine with me. I was working long hours on the oil rigs and taking care of my dad at the beginning and end of each day. I needed low-maintenance cats. The tortie cat began to rebel, though.

I called Kelli one night. “The girl cat won’t leave me alone when I’m eating,” I said.

“It will only get worse if you share with her.” Kelli sounded very confident. She grew up on a farm. She had vaccinated ducks. That made her an expert, she believed.

I was holding a turkey sandwich over my head. The cat was climbing my arm to get to it. I dropped a bit of turkey on the floor to get her off of me.

“Got it,” I said. “No sharing.”

Over the next couple of weeks, I mostly followed the farm girl’s instructions—minus one or two slices of lunch meat when the cat seemed exceptionally hungry. The cat must have appreciated it, because she became very loving, snuggling close to me in bed each night. I noted that she hadn’t puked up her dry food in quite some time, which was a relief.

Kelli came to the house for the first time in a while with a mix of homemade and fast food, as usual. As she set the fast food bag on the counter, the tortie cat sprang up to it.

“This poor cat!” Kelli exclaimed. “She’s skin and bones!” She took a box of chicken nuggets out of the bag and gave one to the cat, who immediately tore into it.

Kelli turned to me. “You’ve been starving this poor cat,” she said. “Didn’t you notice how skinny she was?” Behind her, the cat had pushed the box of chicken nuggets into a corner and was devouring them with an undulating growling sound, as if she were using a small power tool to grind her food. The other cat—a real mama’s boy—ceased his figure-eight pattern around Kelli’s legs and looked at me in a judgmental way.

“Well, the fur kind of hides her figure,” I said. How was I to know? I never vaccinated ducks.

“There’s not an ounce of fat on her body,” Kelli said. “She must freeze in this cold house.” That might explain the snuggling. A starving cat is a heat vampire.

The starving cat pushed the chicken nugget box off the counter and poked her head into the fast food bag, which Kelli snatched away in order to save the French fries. Kelli had also brought foil-wrapped pork chops in an insulated bag. She unwrapped one, tore off a chunk, and put it on the counter for the cat, who ate it with the same vigor with which she had consumed the chicken nuggets.

“I thought cats weren’t allowed on the counter,” I said.

Kelli gave me a look and gave the cat another chunk of pork chop. She had brought one pork chop for herself and two for me. The cat ate all three. She ate until her full belly made the rest of her look skinny and frail, as if she might break a leg jumping down from the counter, so Kelli set her on the linoleum floor and she sauntered away with her tail in the air.

I realize there are a lot of female pronouns here. To be clear, it was the female cat that sauntered away with her tail in the air, not Kelli. Farm girls do not saunter in the house or go around with their tails in the air.

I could have used the cat’s name, Dakota, which is somehow a better name for your pet if you don’t live in the Dakotas. My daughter, who does not live in the Dakotas, was the one who named the cat. Cat naming is not that particular daughter’s forte. When another stray wandered up to the house, she insisted on naming it Benson, even after we discovered that Benson was a pregnant female. A more sensible person renamed the cat Natasha, but that’s a Memorial Day story.

Dakota is thankful for the sunny spot on the carpet, which is where she went to nap while she digested nine chicken nuggets and three pork chops. She slept until the sunny spot wasn’t even in the same room anymore.

Dakota sunning on the rug.

Dakota is also thankful for me. When I’m home, she’s on me like a furry tumor. She loves me. We went through the lean times together. It might be Stockholm syndrome.

I really am thankful for porta-johns. When my Marine battalion rolled into Kuwait on the way out of Iraq, we were overjoyed to see a long line of tan porta-johns with white roofs along one side of our camp. No more PVC urine tubes sticking out of the sand like buried potato canons. No more hasty outhouses like small concession stands where you could sit over one of the holes in the plywood bench and have a conversation with folks walking by. No more pouring diesel fuel onto the contents of the 55-gallon drum halves that were under the holes in the bench and stirring the waste it as it burned. After that, the privacy of a porta-john, even one baking in the Kuwaiti sun, felt like a luxury.

Later, that first private bathroom with a flushing toilet and a sink and a shower was like something out of a dream. Clean water on demand, hot and cold, was amazing. It still is.

In Iraq, we were thankful for care packages. For weeks, we used the travel-sized shampoo to wash our camouflage utilities in plastic buckets. Everything we wore got stiff and itchy. One day, I went to the air base and saw Marines marking off a soccer field. I asked what they were using for the lines. All we have is this powdered laundry detergent, they said. I took two large buckets of it back to our bivouac. We stirred a handful of detergent into a five-gallon pail of water and dropped in a utility blouse and trousers. Mud blossomed in the water. Wash, rinse, repeat and we had clean clothes for the first time since we had arrived. Laundry detergent is a miracle.

Rambler, judgmental boy cat.

In Kuwait, we were also thankful for the shiny white tents and the thin mattresses and pillows on our cots. We had grown accustomed to sleeping with our foam isomats rolled out on the ground or on cement floors, sometimes with a folding cot. The shiny white tents were also air conditioned. I slept like a satiated cat lying on the sunny spot on the carpet. It was several weeks before I could be in an air conditioned space without feeling sleepy. A clean bed and a pillow, especially in a climate-controlled environment, is Heaven.

I’m spending this Thanksgiving with my wife’s family in Indianapolis. I’m thankful for too many things to list, including the friends who are taking care of my wife’s three cats while we’re away. The cats will surely be thankful when my wife returns. No one can match her cat-care expertise. She has vaccinated ducks.