Though the Maggie is a great teller of stories, it seems that it isn’t her stories that have made her such a popular pussycat lately, attracting the neighborhood tomcats - sometimes two at a time - up on my patio and at the door in a feeble attempt to seduce her. Of course this is not an unusual occurrence given both how beautiful she is and the nature of felines, it’s just a bit more frequent now that Spring has sprung, love is in the air and mating is on the mind of humans and non-humans alike.
The other night a particularly vocal and handsome admirer made his way to the patio door to howl incessantly for about an hour in a valiant attempt to woo the Maggie. She was unimpressed and sat with her back to the door ignoring him as best as she could while occasionally looking over her shoulder and letting out an indifferent-yet-growly meow. I do have to give credit where credit is due and mention that the want-to-be suitor was really putting on quite a production, he was the feline equivalent of a peacock fanning its tail feathers mixed with a hint of drunken human desperation. He was giving all he had and had he been vying for the conquest of any other cat’s lady parts, I would have been rooting for him all the way, but not with the Maggie.
While adjusting the volume of the television to cover the mating calls, I said to my friend that I wished I could understand exactly what horny cat on the patio was saying to the Maggie which brought about a conversation on Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden because, as he said, back then (before the whole forbidden fruit eating incident, anyway) animals and humans could speak and understand each other which is why a snake/serpent having a full-on convo with Eve wasn’t an out of the ordinary occurrence (even if it was a metaphor). Poor Adam, I thought, every Spring for who knows how long - up until Eve came along to distract him - had to listen to all of the critters in the garden either screaming “f**k me, f**k me, f**k me!” or “c’mon baby, just the tip.” It seems that the great fruit debacle and subsequent banishment was not without benefit and may just be the reason why when we go outdoors in springtime today, it doesn’t sound like there is a pornographic audio track playing in the background.
Metaphor or not, I pondered this for a bit longer than I probably should have when it dawned on me what a bad thing a universal language would be. I realized the woefully short-sightedness of my wish and was counting my blessings that I hadn’t just rubbed a Jinn out of a magic lamp and wasted a wish on such a thing. I mean, it was pretty clear what was going on and what was being said on both sides of that patio door - foreign language skills were not required - and to be able to understand the meows and howls as words would ultimately just be an annoyance and quite possibly offensive which would cause me to stop liking the non-humans so much. Similar to when I hear my human neighbors having a party or an argument, I prefer that they converse in a language I don’t understand so it is less of a distraction because if I actually understood what they were saying, I might appreciate them less.
Is there a moral to this story?
Be careful of what you wish for, for starters. Also, you don’t have to speak the same language to understand and love your fellow human or non-human and sometimes it’s even better that you don’t.