Frightening Feline Friday: Ferd and Bethel Edition

I’m pretty sure that this story/incident might actually be from where my fear/hatred of cats might stem. I remember it very vividly, yet not vividly at all because I was very young. Maude was present for the shituation, (yes, I meant to say that) so she might be able to shed some more light on it. 

So, picture (roughly) 7-year-old Bev, and 10-year-old Maude. We were at our Page grandparents’ house, so we were likely living the life every grandkid dreams of- you know, pretty much eating, drinking, playing, doing whatever we wanted because… grandparents.

Well, then our grandparents’ good friends, Ferd and Bethel, who lived about three miles from the Page house, called to see if Grandpa and Grandma wanted to come pick up a cat. I can’t remember the specific reason, but this isn’t an uncommon occurrence in rural America… a cat wanders onto a farm where the owners don’t have cats/don’t want to feed it, a cat has kittens and the owners want to get rid of some, etc. (What you haven’t ever called your neighbor/good friend and asked them to come over and pick up a cat?)

In any case, our sweet Grandma Page told Ferd they’d take the cat, so she loaded Maude and me into the green and white Chevy pickup (the one I can picture perfectly that I’m pretty sure she and Grandpa had for most of my childhood), and drove the short distance to Ferd and Bethel’s house.

Again, I don’t remember all the details, but I remember this:

*the cat was, like, yellow. There is probably a name for this, but I don’t know and I sure don’t care to find out.

*the cat did not want to ride in the cab of the truck. This is probably obvious?

*the cat escaped the grasp of the adults trying to corral it into the truck at least 396 times.

*Maude and I just sat in the truck, where the cat basically sprinted from driver’s side to the passenger side over and over, jumping out doors, windows, etc. I’m not sure of the logistics, or what the adults were doing, but my memory seems to think that it felt as though the cat was on some kind of invisible treadmill belt- in the driver’s side window, sprinted across our laps out the passenger side, back in (probably with Grandma?) the driver’s side, back out passenger. Like, five. hundred. times.

I’m pretty sure I blacked out at this point because I have zero recollection of how this ended, other than we did not end up bringing the cat in our truck, and Ferd drove it over to Grandma and Grandpa’s house later.

But I do distinctly remember that the cat pissed in Ferd’s vehicle on the way over.

What a dick.

-Bev

Just for fun, here’s the closest thing I could find for a visual of the ’80s truck. It was green and white, not blue and white, but it was very similar to this rig. In my opinion, seeing the visual makes this story better. And the Page cousins will appreciate the throwback…