If you read my little fables here, you might have noticed that I have written a lot of stories about the bunnies that live in our backyard. You might even think I have written about them a time or two too often. I am certainly aware of the risk of causing bunny fatigue every time I start to tap out another tale.
The truth is, I am sort of obsessive that way. But I find that writing about something so simple as the bunnies, especially the one that thinks I am her Dad, gets my creative clock ticking again and lets me write about non-bunny things too.
This is not the first time an obsession of mine has spilled out into print. For over ten years in the ’80s and ’90s, as an editor at our city’s daily newspaper, The Beacon Herald, I wrote a column called The County Line every Friday. One day I had nothing to write about and so I spun a little true tale about how my two cats got fighting over the same heat grate they both wanted to sit on one cold winter’s night. I thought it was funny they wanted the same grate when they had the choice of several others. How human, I thought.
I got a fair response to that story, more than I had to others I’d written on more sober subjects, so now and then, I dribbled out another cat tale.
This was all too much for a crusty neighbour of mine who wrote a brief but pointed letter to the editor at my paper.
“Tell Hagarty to quit writing about his cats,” the letter said.
Now here is how I knew I lived in a small town.
The newspaper printed my neighbour’s letter.
And here’s another sign I wasn’t living in a metropolis.
The letter didn’t bother me that much, although it didn’t slow down my cat stories. In fact, it might have speeded them up for a while.
I had reason to believe that one of my cats, Grumbles, had become a bit of a celebrity with column readers and I wasn’t about to give that up. The one story I didn’t write about her was about the day she died. I didn’t want my readers to know.
In any case, on my walks, I would encounter my letter-writing neighbour Bill sitting on his front steps and I’d go up and have a chat with him. We talked about a lot of things. Politics. Family. Life.
But he never asked about my cats.
He didn’t really have to, I suspect. Their latest antics were well laid out in the local newspaper. Even though I had to put up with the odd taunt such as, “My dog loves your column. I saw him pouring over it the other day.”
©2021 Jim Hagarty
