Monday morning there was a minor mystery in the Schwartzberg household.
It started out like any other day. My alarm went off at 6:05 and I hit the snooze button. It went off again at 6:14 and I begrudgingly got out of bed, replacing the sound of the alarm with the sound of creaking—whether it be of my bed or my bones, I could not tell. I took a shower and got dressed. I walked into the living room and saw our grey cat, Muffin, standing in the hallway looking at me with her usual “feed me” stare and our black cat, Ping, curled up in a comfy ball on the couch. I proceeded to the kitchen and started making lunch for myself and my two sons.
At 6:40 I abruptly stopped mid-stroke while slathering a piece of bread with mayo and went back down the hallway to start waking up the boys. I spent 30 seconds attempting to wake each boy with barely any kind of response at all and then headed back to the kitchen to continue sandwich making. I repeated this process every five minutes, becoming slightly more aggressive with each successive attempt, until slowly, but surely, the boys started to wake up. The goal is to get them out of bed and getting ready for school by 7:00. I usually have more success with my younger son than my older son. This is our routine. It plays out every morning.
After 7:00 I was finalizing lunches and starting to get breakfast ready—usually cereal or waffles. The younger lad was out and eating by about 7:05, while his older brother was in his room with his door closed, presumably getting dressed—a process that somehow always takes the better part of 20 minutes. It’s during this timeframe that I normally feed the cats. The moment I put a finger on the cat food dish, Muffin came racing over, like a fuzzy, feline Usain Bolt. I fed her first in the kitchen, then walked down the hallway to feed Ping outside of our bedroom doors. While Ping isn’t as frantic about it as Muffin, he usually seems fairly anxious to follow me down the hallway to get fed. But not yesterday.
I walked down the hallway with food dish in hand and Ping was nowhere to be seen or heard. I called for him and heard nothing. I slowly walked back toward the living room gently shaking the food dish in the hopes of attracting him, but instead, Muffin, came running down the hall. Even though Muffin hadn’t finished her own food, I’m not surprised that she came at the sound of Ping’s food, since she seems to enjoy stealing his food more than eating her own. (It’s the same food—she’s just a brat.) And still, no Ping.
My younger son is obsessed with our cats and usually knows their whereabouts, so I asked him if he knew where Ping was and he had no clue. I knocked on my older son’s door and asked if Ping was in there with him and he said, “No,” so I moved on. I checked all the obvious spots like his cardboard mancave, the guest bathroom tub, and under our desks, but he wasn’t there. I had no idea where he could be, since we live in a small, three-bedroom house and all the bedroom doors were closed.
At 7:28 my older son finally came out of his room (we are supposed to leave at 7:30 to get them to school on time, so he now had all of two minutes to eat breakfast) and I asked him, “Are you sure Ping isn’t in your room?”
“He came in there earlier, when you were waking me up, but he’s not in there now,” he said.
Hmmm…I wondered. I went back into his room and looked around. The place looked like Delta House the morning after the toga party. It’s possible to hide several passed out frat boys under all the piles of junk strewn about, so losing an eight-pound cat in there is entirely plausible. I looked in the hole under his bed and found several dozen MAD magazines and a metric ton of Legos, but no cat. I looked under the sleeping bag, backpack and other mud-encrusted gear heaped in a corner from the camping trip he went on a month earlier, but no cat. I looked in his closet and saw piles of old clothes, video game guidebooks and schoolwork he forgot to turn in two years earlier, but still no cat. All the while I was gently shaking the food dish in the hopes that Ping’s hunger would make him surface. No luck at all and suddenly I realized that I spent too much time in the maze of pre-teen artifacts and it was now 7:32!
I ran out of the room, hustled the kids into the car and got them to school just as the bell was ringing. Normally, I would have gone straight to work at this point, but I was unsettled about Ping’s unknown whereabouts, so I headed back home. Once inside, I rechecked all the nooks and crannies in the living room, kitchen, and dining room that I had already checked and I came up empty. At that point, more than mildly concerned, I headed back down the hallway toward the bedrooms and as soon as I did, I heard the meowing…coming from my older son’s room. I opened the door and Ping casually walked out like nothing had happened. He had been hiding in my son’s pseudo frat house the whole time. Where he had been in that miasma of random junk when I searched for him earlier, I had no idea, but I quickly fed him and headed to work.
On my morning commute I made a mental note to have my son clean up his room—and search for any random wildlife that may have taken up residence.
