Cats and Motorcycles
Two Words That Should Never Appear in the Same Sentence
Editor’s Note: The primary mandate for setting up a Substack notebook is picking a niche so that potential subscribers can find your notebook by looking up a clearly-defined subject area.
Nope. With Mountain Passages I want to write about anything that comes to mind. Anything that might be entertaining, and if I get an essay exactly right, anything that makes you think about a point I’m trying to make with an essay. I should have called this notebook “Niche-Free” but Mountain Passages has a number of meanings that reflect the variety of essays that have appeared here over the last six months.
I also wanted Mountain Passages to be a digital magazine for a wide variety of writers whose essays I find entertaining, and often informative, or just because I like the way they write.
The first of these writers is my old friend Pat Moore. When we were kids in another century, Pat was always the kid who said, “Watch This!” And then did something insanely difficult or dangerous, or just ridiculous. My enduring memory of Pat is him saying to me in a bar, “Here, hold my beer,” after betting some gullible fool that he, Pat, could do a backflip off the top the bar. We drank a number of free beers as kids.
Some of those “Watch This” kids ended up doing seriously dangerous jobs such as game wardens or power line riggers, and some were trashed for their bravado.
Not Pat. While he has come close to getting trashed by surviving five parachute malfunctions, a fall from a fast moving truck, and an apartment fire, most of his misadventures are his own fault and funny.
Pat has what would be called a spotty resume. Starting with a stint as an Air Force airborne weather observer, he has also been a skydiver, TV weatherman, small business owner, videographer, recruiter, artist, and NASTAR champion skier and snowboarder.
It could be that this resume is due to a short attention span, but more, it is his intense curiosity about all sorts of things, a highly creative streak, and a substantial desire to push limits to illogical levels.
And his latest adventure? He’s the author of Bad Decisions Make Great Stories where this essay first appeared.
I’m alanstark1@substack.com
Cats and Motorcycles
Two Words That Should Never Appear in the Same Sentence
By Pat Moore
About a year before my discharge from the Air Force, I married a fellow skydiver. She wasn’t yet 21, so we had to get her parents’ permission to wed. I was stationed at Tampa’s MacDill Air Force Base and we had a $70-a-month apartment that prohibited pets. Showing remarkable restraint, she limited herself to five cats. Each was named for parts of a parachute: Bungie, Grommet, Toggles, Twill, and I forget the other one. Her job as a claim rep for an insurance company called for her to do some day trips around Florida, so she would take our 1970 Maverick and leave me my Honda 125 motorcycle to commute to the base.
One morning as I was getting ready to leave for work, I noticed that Grommet, an oversize orange ball of fur, was extremely lethargic. This cat reveled in bouncing off the walls most mornings. When I saw him lying there and refusing to eat, I knew something must be seriously wrong. His eyes were barely open, and he made a soft whimpering noise. Knowing how much he meant to my wife, I was frantic. I knew there was a vet’s office a few miles away, so I picked up the limp feline and tried to figure out how I would get him to the vet without a car. We had no carrier, and even if I found something, there was no way to attach it to the motorcycle.
I was wearing my 1505s, a short-sleeved Air Force khaki uniform, and figured I could place the cat inside my shirt. I wasn’t wearing an undershirt, but Grommet was so inert I figured there was little danger of him scratching me. I walked out to the Honda, keeping a wary eye for the property manager who might wonder how I had managed to acquire such a large “spare tire” in so short a time.
I strapped on my helmet and gave a swift push on the kick starter. The tinny engine came to life, and unfortunately so did Grommet.
He began to mew loudly, and I got the bike in gear and took off. That’s when things really got dicey. Grommet panicked and began doing laps inside my shirt. He would dig his claws into my skin and race clockwise circuits faster than he had ever moved before. I got stopped by a traffic light, and a van pulled up next to me. I was trying to ignore the driver’s astonished stare as the lower half of my shirt exhibited more movement than an accomplished belly dancer. Grommet came to a screeching halt, stuck his orange head out the top of my shirt, and then dove back inside, retracing his frantic laps, this time in a counter-clockwise direction. His claws were digging in so deeply that spots of blood were beginning to appear on my shirt. The light was still red but I couldn’t wait any longer. I popped a wheelie and took off at high speed for the vet’s. I pulled into his parking lot and skidded to a halt.
I ran inside and dragged the cat out of my shirt. The vet and his assistant dropped what they were doing and immediately began treatment – on me. They gave the cat a cursory look, pronounced him perfectly normal, and then treated my wounds. Later, as I sat in the waiting room waiting for the pain of the antiseptic to subside, I contemplated how I would get the cat home. Grommet lay sprawled on the floor next to me, purring contentedly.
Admittedly my thought processes weren’t operating at peak performance, but clearly, there was no solution other than the way I had gotten him to the vet’s. With great reluctance, I picked him up and placed him back inside my shirt. The return trip was a repeat of the outbound journey. I got home as quickly as I could, treated my new injuries, changed into a clean shirt, and headed for work. Slipping under the Venetian blinds, Grommet, like the Cheshire Cat, sat in the window, grinning at me as I rode off.
END
Order Pat’s book from any of the usual suspects, Pat Moore, Bad Decisions Make Great Stories. ISBN 108804493X, paperback.
If you would like to comment on Pat’s essay or just say hi, send a note to alanbearstark@gmail.com and I’ll pass the note along to Pat.
Mountain Passages doesn’t pay writers very well, but if you subscribe, I’ll share half of the money with Pat. However, a FREE subscription to Substack is available if you just click the button. When you get to the subscription page, go all the way to the right to sign-up for a free subscription. A paid subscription is always appreciated; I’m slowly writing my way to buying a gravel bike.
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Don’t like commerce? Times are tough, so I get it. One of the ways I can build a Substack notebook is to add subscribers. Ask a friend to subscribe, please. In any event, thank you for reading Mountain Passages, an archive is available at alanstark1@substack.com
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