The Importance of Ritual

I was lying in bed, oh, 30 minutes ago, post-marathon-painting yesterday at Erin’s Little House in the Hood, post-follow-up margaritas, post-sleep-of-the-exhausted-and-drunken-dead, reflecting on how much the Daylight-Savings-Time gain of an hour changes the tenor of the morning when Liza Bean Bitey (of the Minneapolis Biteys) interrupted my reverie.

Don’t let Liza Bean fool you. She may be bilingual. She may be a snappy dresser and a surprisingly good dancer. She may make a mean baklava. She may even try to sell you questionable real estate. But she is still a cat. A tiny, clever, credit-card sneaking-online-shopping cat.

Weekend mornings at the home of William and Pearl Throckmorton the III mean two things: good coffee and happy-hoppin’.

The coffee? That’s our thing.

The happy hoppin’? That’s Liza Bean Bitey’s thing.

Liza Bean wakes up like any other kitteh: slowly and luxuriously, an incredible display of yawning, stretching, of climbing up and over one’s recumbent body, swatting at one’s hair, nibbling at one’s ear lobes. Liza is the reason I no longer wear earrings to bed – while funny to the observer, there is something disturbing about having a cat’s nose in your ear while it chews and tugs at your only pair of real gold hoops.

But the best part of the morning ritual comes after the pawing/clawed massage she gives you (“making muffins’, Willie calls it), after the snorting in your ear, after the adorable flopping over and looking at you upside down. The best part is the happy hops.

Not sure how this started. Not sure it’s important. But the best part comes when you stand up, because if you stand up, go to the foot of the bed, and lean over, placing both hands on the bed, Liza Bean runs to the other end of the bed and then charges toward you.

“Meeeeeeeeeeee!”, she says; and when she reaches the end of the bed, she rears up on her back legs until she is upright, slamming into your arms/chest, coming down on all fours, only to run back to the head of the bed to do it again.

“Meeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

Why? No one knows.

After three or four times of doing this, she leaps from the bed, runs to the kitchen and then back to the bed. “Time for my half-and-half! Where’s my half-and-half? Have you poured the half-and-half yet? Where’s my half-and-half?”

And so on and so forth.

This is Sunday morning.

Welcome.