the smedley log - suburban scrawl

One strange cat

When I was younger (like childhood younger) I remember this cat we had at home. It was my sister’s cat, and her name was Misty (the cat, not my sister).

Misty had a tendency, especially on warm summer days, to seek shade under the right rear fender of my father’s ‘69 VW Beetle. I guess it made sense, except that as her age increased, her alertness seemed to decrease somewhat, so there were risks in taking naps on top of the rear wheel of the car. One of those risks, you might guess, was that the car would start moving and she would be rolled off the wheel and run over.

Now, this didn’t seem too likely, and there were all sorts of reasons why. One is that the rear wheel well of a 1969 VW Beetle resides adjacent to the engine compartment, which, even when one isn’t sleeping in the wheel well, is not a quiet place. Given the combination of a noisy horizontally-opposed engine and a cat’s, um, cat-like reflexes, it would seem unrealistic to expect a cat to sleep through the starting of the car’s engine, let alone to remain in her stupor long enough to be flung underneath the wheel of the car as it rolled backward.

Unlikely? Yes—but nonetheless, this is what happened. My father started the car, shifted into reverse and slowly started backing. And then we all felt that strange bump where we were reasonably sure no bump should’ve been.

Now… If you can think of one thing more unlikely than the cat sleeping through the starting of the car and not having the presence of mind to flee the scene before being run over by the tire upon which she was just dozing, what would it be?

If you guessed “surviving the experience unscathed and subsequently streaking across the yard to the safety of the front porch”, you are correct. Not even the vet could tell that anything adverse had befallen our feline friend. She had been run over by the rear wheel of our little German bug, and she had lived to tell of it—well, if she could indeed communicate (and if so, I’m sure she went on to warn all of her cat companions of the dangers of sleeping on car wheels—or perhaps she might have recommended her old perch to one or two of her less endearing acquaintances, who knows).

To this day, it remains an incident for which I’ve never heard a satisfying explanation. Don’t know why this occurred to me today, but it did, so I thought I’d share it. But I couldn’t let it slide ‘til, say, the day after tomorrow or I’d be one of those “Friday cat bloggers,” and that would never do.

The comment you refer to is very un-Smedley. I don’t know who left it, but I very much doubt it was H2.

Man, that’s a Stephen King story..whew! That did make me smile when she streaked across the yard. Great one.

I love cat stories and that was an excellent one. One thing to consider, VW Beetles are exceptionally light. Aren’t there stories of people lifting them? I think so. Maybe that’s why the cat survived. In any event, that’s one resilient cat.

I’ve always been of the opinion that cats are actually aliens. Your story just reinforces that.

Glad y’all enjoyed the story; now taking your comments in order:

Funky,
I wasn’t even aware of what he was referring to at first, and I ended up deleting the comment in my confusion. Sorry about that (now nobody else here will know what you’re referring to either—I probably should have just let it stay there).

Anyway, thanks for the support—as you suspected, I was not the rogue commenter in that thread, and I’m curious to know who would have left such a comment like that with this blog listed as their website. (I might add my own actual comment there too, just to let him know.)

Frank,
It was kind of eerie to me at the time, too.

Melissa,
The old Beetles were relatively light, but still weighed around a ton, and the concentration of weight is mostly to the rear on the original models (one reason why they also had legendary traction in snow/ice)

Tom,
I’ve long shared your suspicions, and this memory has a lot to with that.