An ongoing thread

For my own sake, I'm going to continue to post "Scratchy memories" as they come back to me. I hope it's not too macawbre ... I just want to get everything down in one place. My own personal Pensieve, in a way.

Scratchy's favorite toy of all time was rabbit's feet. He had a few minor dalliances with the more commercial cat toys, but the simple good luck charm won out over the years. Every time he got his teeth on one, he carried it around with him until he'd eaten every last bit out of the metal cap.

Yes, he ate them. Artificially colored fur and all. Purring the whole time as he munched. He never got sick from them, either. When we tried to throw the "empty" away, it would somehow find its way back into the house, and we'd hear loud protests if we were caught carrying it away. We learned to throw the beaten-up metal caps away directly in the big trash bin in the garage.

What would he do with this empty cap with probably not the slightest bit of rabbit left anywhere near it? He'd carry it around, lick it, chew on it, and if he could catch a likely mark, he'd play fetch with it. We'd throw it as far as we liked, and he'd tear off, sometimes hurtling over people (like my grandma, who was crocheting at the time) to get to it. We started messing with him -- pretending to throw it and laughing when he'd come back with a confused "maow?" He caught on to us; eventually he learned to watch the direction of our throw, then look up at our hands. If we showed him empty hands, he'd dash off. If not, we'd get a Very Dirty Look.

At one point, I guess he'd been out of Rabbit Foot for too long in his opinion. He ate the tail off my uncle Mark's childhood authentic coonskin cap, which I had just inherited from my grandma. The entire tail. As in, we never found a single trace of it, not even in the litter box. When I showed the remaining coonskin pillbox hat to the ScratchMan, he didn't even bother to pretend not to recognize it. He tried to get a nibble. I threw out the rest of the hat in the big trash bin, but I waited until trash day, just to make sure it got out safely.

If you ever read this, Uncle Mark, sorry about that. I never knew those things held their original scent that long.