Alarming News
Well, w hen my human told me the news, you could have knocked me over with afeather toy. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and you can bet that I can hear a lotbetter than you.
Before I explain, let me intro duce myself. I am a very special tabby cat of a certain age. Actual ly, I’m not sure what age, because like some others I seem to have misplacedmy birth certificate. My human says I must be about 10 years old, so I’ll take his wordfor it. In cat years that’s…um, let’s just say that I’m in extremely late adolescence.
I go by the moniker “Tiggy” as a kind of shorthand for Tigger, the name my human gave me because of my beautiful tiger-like stripes. Actually (and this is a bit embarrassing), before my human invited me to live with him I was called Fanny. I didn’t care for that name. Someone suggested it had something to do with my being a bit “broad in the fantail,” whatever that means.
But getting back to the alarming news, my human announced that we were going toleave our comfortable house in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, and go to live in a little box on wheels. He says it’s a “motor home,” but it looks like a box to me. It’s seriously lame compared to our five-bedroom house. What is he thinking?
Well of course I raised all kinds of objections, but my human just told me to quit caterwauling” and take it like a cat. When I realized that he was serious, I thought about taking those lemons I’d been given and making some lemonade. Fortunately I remembered that I hate lemonade, so I decided to go off in a huff and find a dark place to lurk. We cats are good at that.
Later when I came out to check the food bowl, my human suggested that I take a positive approach to living in that little box on wheels. He told me it would be a lot of fun, seeing different places and meeting other humans and animals. And then he suggested a great idea: that I should start my own written account of what it’s like to be a traveling cat.
He said it could be in the form of a “blog” (whatever that is) and that we could call it “Travels with Tiggy.” He said that title would remind readers of something about some old guy and his dog, but I don’t get that part and I don’t care much for dogs. He said I could become a kind of feline Jack Kerouac. He explained that this “Jack” person was known for being “on the road,” but any smart cat knows that’s no place to be unless you want to end up as road kill du jour.
Anyway, about that time I heard about this great new publicat ion, The Bosque Beast,and I decided I wanted to become a contributing writer. (In the interest of full disclosure, I can’t actually write. After all, I’m a cat, and such things are beneath me. Anyway, my human has offered to help me with the actual “writing” part, while I come up with the ideas and other hard stuff.)
We’re going to begin our endless journey in mid-October. My human says we’ll migrate south as the weather gets cooler, and spend the winter months someplace warm called the Gulf Coast. Well, that sounds OK, but still we’ll be living in a little box on wheels, so it can’t be that good.
Nevertheless, I’ll look forward to reporting on our adventures. You can follow me on my blog by going to my human’s web site, starphoenixbase.com, and clicking on “Travels with Tiggy” in the right-hand column. You can also reach me through my human’s funny little TV thingy that he spends so much time looking at while playing with what he thinks is a mouse. (I’ve tried to set him straight on that, but he continues in his delusion. Not that I have anything against playing with mice.) His name is David Brown and you can send messages for me to his email address below (if you’re a cat you canget your human to write for you. No dogs, please).
David L. Brown is a recently widowed writer and photographer who is living full-time on the road in his RV, accompanied by his cat Tiggy. He is immediate past president of the Society of Professional Journalists New Mexico and West Texas chapter, and a life member of the American Society of Media Photographers. He can be reached at david@dlbrowninc.com. You can follow Tiggy’s adventures at http://www.travelswithtiggy.com