A cat and a mouse

Of course, you remember Teeny, Lauren's black cat?

Here I am in Chicago, visiting Lauren and Teeny Weeny. Teeny bears his name because Lauren found him an orphan, maybe four weeks old, fending for himself on a busy street by the post office. It wasn't an easy feat to catch Teeny. Lauren and a friend spent hours trying to catch him. Finally, in desperation, the then unnamed untamed Teeny ran into a restaurant, and there he was finally captured.

Maybe Lauren should have called him Feisty-Weisty.

Anyway, Lauren kept him confined in her bathroom. Very soon he ate from her hand, and Teeny was tamed.

For all his life, maybe five years, Teeny had a yard consisting of an acre or more and hundreds of trees to climb. He went in and out of the house, and the world was his.

Now he lives in Lauren's tiny studio apartment on the eighteenth floor in Chicago, and he is confined. Confined, in the middle of the night, he has been known to get what Lauren lovingly -- and sometimes not so lovingly -- calls the Midnight Crazies. He only wants to play.

One of Teeny's favorite games is Mousie. Mousie is where he fetches one of his many little mice. What he likes to do, especially in the middle of the night, is to take a little love-torn toy mouse, drop it on Lauren's sleeping chest. When that doesn't gain him a response, then he drops it on her face. If still no reaction, he bats the mousie around on her face. Finally, Lauren wakes up, and throws mousie. Teeny fetches it back, drops one or more of a dozen mousies onto Lauren's chest, and this maybe goes on fifteen times before wide-awake Teeny, allows Lauren, groggy-eyed, to go back to sleep before her alarm goes off at 6 a.m.

Now I am here. This morning, what Teeny decides to do in the wee hours is to toss himself from the back of the couch on which I sleep, directly onto my chest. The cat himself becomes mousie!

So, at about three a.m. this morning, Teeny woke me in this not so subtle way. Since I was awake, I did what I always do first thing, and that is open the computer and start Godwriting™. Here I am happily typing away, when Teeny decides to honor me with a game of regular Mousie.

After a toss or two, Teeny is content to sit beside me, with my arm around him, all content and cozy while he and I talk over old times.

Nothing is more important to me than Godwriting. Nothing comes before Godwriting.

But for a few moments in the wee hours of this morning, to sit with Teeny,  my arm around him, becomes the most important thing in the world to do.