Things that Make You Go Hmmmm

There's a cat that lives two doors down, in a basement apartment, who will be let out to hang around the steps and sidewalk. I've never seen this cat go farther than a few feet from his homebase. Every so often I'll see it hiding behind a step and when a dog goes by, the cat will lunge at it hissing, just to scare the crap out of the dog.

It's actually kind of funny to watch the poor, dumb dog strolling down the street --dum, dum, dee,dum -- without a care in the world and then hisssssssssss goes the cat and the dog typically jumps up. So today I warned a dog walker about the cat, and she said, "He [meaning her dog] wouldn't even know what it was." As I was wondering what that meant, she added, "He's never seen a cat."

Wow. A dog that's never seen a cat. That just struck me as weird. But there are so few cats let outside in the city and if the owner didn't have a cat and didn't have friends with cats, of course the dog would never have seen one.

It reminded me of this woman who lived near me my freshman year in college in the dorm and appropos of some late night discussion we were having announced that she never ate a hamburger. WHAT?? A child of the 50s/60s who had never had a hamburger? I remember we grilled her (ha! no pun intended) as to how she could have gotten to be 18 years of age without ever having eaten a hamburger.

These days an 18 year old hamburger virgin wouldn't be that hard to believe -- growing up with vegan parents or not eating red meat or whatever, but back then, not having eaten a hamburger was just plain un-American!