How Many Lives Has the Cat?

Maybe it started when he was a child and he proved to his friends he could jump from his roof to the ground without hurting himself. He landed on his feet (like a cat), absorbing the shock by letting his legs give, and with his hands. Yes, his soles and ankles hurt for a couple of days, but he didn’t tell anyone, and his friends nicknamed him “The Cat.”

Or maybe it was because of his quick reflexes, like when one of his pitches rocketed back at him and he snagged the whizzing baseball at the last possible split second, an instant before it would have struck him squarely in the face; missed by a whisker.

Maybe it had something to do with how he was kind of sneaky, pretty good at covering his tracks.

They say cats have nine lives. If so, now that The Cat has lasted so many years, he seems to have used up nearly all of them.

He used the first one when he was only four — just a kitten, you might say. He was bent over the footstool in the living room, crying, in great pain. If his mom and dad had not whisked him to the ER, the surgeon — who was also the family doctor — said his appendix would have burst within a few hours, and he probably would not have survived.

One day when he was about 11, he was with a couple of friends at the creek in Dennis Scivally Park when he heard a rustling next to his foot. It looked like a copperhead slithering in the grass — and was later positively identified as one. He grabbed a sturdy stick and beat it to death. That makes two cat lives.

The next year, he was riding back from a Cardinals game with his younger brother who was asleep in the backseat and their college student neighbor, who was driving. It was late at night. When the driver began to nod off, the young Cat noticed something but wasn’t sure what was happening. The car drifted toward the shoulder, kicked up a little gravel, the tires hissing as it headed off the highway. Quickly, he yelled and shook the driver, who awoke with a shock and swerved back onto the road. That’s three.

A couple years later, he was on a double date. He and his girlfriend were in the backseat of his buddy’s sports car. She was tired and decided to call it a night, so he did, too. The next day, he learned the other couple had had a wreck, and it crushed the roof and back seat area as flat as an aluminum can. You would have had to be no taller than that copperhead to have survived. Cat life number four.

In the summer of 1972, he and a buddy worked on the highway and county back roads of the Missouri Bootheel spraying Johnson Grass. They worked in the blistering heat all the way down to the Arkansas border. This job had not yet caught up with technology, and it almost cost them their lives. In those days, there were no electronic directional arrows alerting drivers to use caution around highway workers just ahead. All they had was a painted wooden sign.

So one day, a speeding car came up fast from behind. The driver must have been distracted; he just kept on coming. The Cat and his buddy standing on the truck bed yelled and waved desperately. At the last moment, the startled driver swerved and missed the truck by inches. Count it, five lives.

Later that summer, he thought he probably had enough time to pass a slow-moving elderly couple driving in front of him. Between Jackson and Cape on the old two-lane Highway 61, he pulled out and leaned on the gas. But a big, low-hanging limb blocked him from seeing an oncoming car. He saw he couldn’t make it in time, so he tried to swing back behind the old man’s car.

One problem: The old man tried to help him by slowing down even more. Now, The Cat didn’t have time to get in front of or behind that car. He heard a long blare from the oncoming car’s horn, slammed on the brakes and felt his out-of-control Mustang spin into a full 360, careening off the road and flying into a ditch. The Cat and his three friends sat, stunned. He had not made a sound. One of his friends broke the silence: “Stoic to the end.”

They got out, looked the car over and were amazed. No apparent damage. They climbed back in and headed back down the road.

He’s used up a couple more cat lives since then, but their stories will have to wait. We’ve run out of space for now. That leaves him just one short of his nine lives. And you’ve probably guessed, now that you’ve read this column fully, that The Cat is yours truly.