A cat's tail — based on a true story

It's a summer night in the 'burbs.

A warm breeze.

Dogs, barking.

A siren.

Then more sirens, followed by more sirens and a police helicopter.

Floodlights.

Red and blue lights flash — radio squawking. A uniformed officer is on his feet. The cul-de-sac is blocked by a black-and-white.

Neighbors call each other. "What's going on?"

Helicopter circling.

The officer walks the street, shining a light into the darker corners of the front yard landscapes.

He stops.

Another black-and-white appears from the shadows, strutting across the lawn in its summer lion cut, an embarrassing poof at the end of its tail. Its body language says, "HEY, THIS IS MY YARD!"

The officer reacts to a squawk on his radio, hurries back to his cruiser, and drives off.

Helicopter follows.

A warm breeze.

Dogs, barking.

All the black-and-whites have left the neighborhood except one.

And now it wants something to eat. And a nap. Happy that it’s done its job.

The case of the missing turkey

The photograph shows my brother Kevin standing in awe of me, the master engineer and painter, painting our toybox red, one hand in my pocket, and not a drop of paint on my clothes.

Or my brother stood there thinking, "What BS, we didn't ask for a toybox, and if we did, it certainly wouldn't be fire-engine red! And who lets a 5-year-old paint in his street clothes? And, what about that hat?"

Anyway, a few weeks later, the day before Thanksgiving, the toybox became the temporary home of a half-frozen, 12-pound turkey corpse.

Turkey moocher Hairy. It was his first mug shot and last turkey, as far as I know. This was also one of my first photographs.

My mother started her day by placing the frozen turkey to thaw in the kitchen sink. In the early afternoon, she dragged my brother and me to the grocery store. We lived in Hastings Ranch at the time, so stores were not exactly close by. But I can’t imagine being gone for more than an hour.

When we returned, the turkey was missing. My mother was dumbfounded. Had someone stolen her turkey?

She couldn’t believe Hairy, our 8-pound cat, could drag a 12-pound frozen turkey out of the sink, across the house, into our bedroom, into our closet, then up into the toy box. But there is no other explanation (my brother neither confirmed nor denied his involvement). And the cat had nothing to say about it.

There’s not much more to the story than that. And while I can't remember the details, if I were to guess, my mom cooked the turkey, didn't wash our toys, and I started losing my hair at 18.

Hairy lived on till he was 13 or 14. I don’t know what happened to the toy box.