A ceiling incident
A chapter from The Booger Cat Chronicles
Pay attention to the title, which says “A ceiling incident” and not “the ceiling incident”. The reasoning for this is that there is more than one ceiling related or ceiling adjacent incident in the Booger Cat Chronicles.
This was maybe two or three months after I had adopted Rocky and Scarlet. Both cats were adopted from a foster cat parent within Savannah, Georgia where I was attending college. The college, being ten hours away by car from my hometown in Kentucky, involved quite the journey back. I would usually do this trip within a day, leaving as early as possible to avoid hitting certain peak traffic times in the two major cities I’d have to drive through.
However, a friend of mine who lived more towards the middle of Kentucky had told me that a super rad live production of “Walking with Dinosaurs” was going to be taking place near him. This presented a more interesting choice. By altering my route and staying there overnight, I could go see giant moving dinosaur puppetry with a pal before going home. Obviously, this was what I had to do.
This was the first, but not the last, many-hours drive I took with Rocky and Scarlet. I’ve heard of some people who would go to a vet and get something to make their pets sleepy or relaxed for a long car drive. Being a college student and lacking the sensibility to look into something like this, I had my car packed up for my return trip home and the cats squeezed cozily into their carrier together. They voiced their discontent with angry meows for at least an hour of the drive before begrudgingly quieting down.
When I arrived in Kentucky at my friend’s house, he showed me around the place he was renting with some roommates. I needed somewhere for my skittish cats (or, “skittery kitteries” as I eventually started calling them) to hide away from other humans they didn’t trust or want to look at. My friend offered me the laundry room in the lower level of the house. It was a decent size and had the best feature that I needed: a door to shut the cats in. I released them into the room, reassured them that I’d be back soon, then went to see some freakin’ sweet animatronic dinosaurs performing live for a few hours.
After the show, I went to the same laundry room to check on my cats. However, when I opened the door, the only feline face staring back at me was Scarlet’s. I closed the door behind me and searched the room, but couldn’t find Rocky anywhere. Slightly panicked, I went back out the door again and shut it quickly behind me, immediately conjuring up all the horrible possibilities of Rocky escaping the laundry room and somehow making it outside to be lost in the middle of Kentucky.
But as soon as the doorknob clicked into place, I heard a small thump from inside the laundry room. Like someone had dropped something on one of the machines? I turned back around and opened the door to find Rocky standing awkwardly next to Scarlet, eyes wide like he’d been caught in the act of stealing. I stared back, utterly confused as to where he’d been. I’d searched this whole room and the last thing I was staring at when I backed out was Scarlet to make sure she didn’t follow.
That’s when I looked directly above Rocky to find the hole in the ceiling.
I’m not the tallest of people, but if the average room is eight or nine feet in height and the average washer is around four feet, it suggested that Rocky made a standing jump of at least four or five feet from the washer to scramble into the hole in the ceiling. Either that, or there was some other hole that led to the ceiling? If there was, I never found it.
Later, we drove the rest of the way back to my hometown, where my mom insisted both cats stay in the unfinished basement of the house. This was to avoid any incidents where the cats would try to scratch her furniture or make a mess of the rest of the house. The basement, being an unfinished one, didn’t have any sort of tiled ceiling, only rafters.
But, like I mentioned at the beginning, that’s a different ceiling story for a different day.
That's one for a cat psychologist!
Cats can leap amazingly high!