Bentley never ceases to amaze us with his awareness of things. We've seen him watch TV before, ads and things like that, where patterns move rapidly. Cartoons are a favorite. But this time it was a show on CBC's The Nature of Things, all about the domestic cat. For the first five minutes he sat demurely, facing the TV with his ears alertly pricked. Then suddenly he jumped up on the TV stand as if he wanted to become part of the action on the screen. Obviously he knew these were cats, but because we adopted him so young, I'm not sure how many cats he has actually seen or interacted with. But he knew. At some point he even looked around behind the screen, as if he thought the cats were actually there. Then he pawed at the screen the way he sometimes paws at the window. This carried on for at least half of the hour-long show, meaning my cat has a longer attention span than most humans.
He often did look like part of the show, which was a bit eerie. He fit right in. It gave the program an oddly 3D look. The first gif looks a bit like one of those silhouettes of a movie audience watching a romantic encounter on-screen.
Until that old geezer/cat expert comes on-screen, it looks for all the world as if Bentley is scratching at a real fence.
Bentley doesn't just want to be on TV. He wants to be in TV.
Theres been a plane flying over port coquitlam and coquitlam area for several months now. When it gets dark out the plane does not turn on its navagation red and green lights or its strobe light. Its pitch black out and its 12: 17 am now and its still going in circles.It usually flys in circles for six or seven hours every day or second day. The people at the airports say its government surveilance and they cant talk about it.I phoned two different airports.I think it might be time to move out of populated areas if this is going on in so many cities.It cant be just for grow ops.The plane is a cessna 182 turbo prop.You would think its kind of unsafe flying with no warning lights on. Its an accident waiting to happen.
I hear things.
I hear hums. I hear buzzes. I hear pulsating things.
Whatever they are.
I can almost block it out. If I'm concentrating on something else, it almost goes away. But not quite.
Right now, this minute, at 2:58 p.m. on February 13, 2017, I hear something.
It's a low, monotone, hummy, buzzy - but no, not hummy OR buzzy, though it is on one note all the time, like the tone that would not stop resounding in Robert Schumann's head and eventually drove him insane.
I hear this same monotone very late at night, only louder. And it has a different variation. It's definitely the grindy low noise of an aircraft, which at first I assumed was a helicopter because it got louder and softer, and, just when you thought it was gone, louder again. I honestly did not think a plane could do that. They fly over, don't they? So it must be something else.
But it doesn't have the budda-budda-budda sound of a helicopter. It's a low, grinding engine-buzz. Really, it's like a plane out of the 1940s, or something from the TV series Sky King.Earrrrrrooooooo! But that doesn't describe it either.
When I finally dared to poke around the internet about this subject, I mainly got those end-of-the-world trumpet-blast videos. This isn't that. At all. This has a low, grindy, even doom-y mechanized sound.
My cat hates this. The other night, when he was all moon-eyed and lit up with cat-somnia, he jumped up on the windowsill and looked at me. There was panic in his eyes. "Do something," he seemed to be saying.
Oops, right now, this minute, I hear a plane, and I tell you it is NOTHING LIKE what I hear at night. This plane swoops in tone - in music, it would be a glissando - from high to low. What I hear is always monotone.
It sounds like hell.
It sounds like death.
"It's probably the police looking for drug dealers," my husband said. "Or criminals in general."
"But how would you SEE a drug dealer or a criminal from the air, and in the middle of the night? Why do they circle around and around for seemingly hours?"
"I don't know, but they do." He is a scientist and has an answer for everything, usually the opposite of my terrified, panic-stricken, paranoia-drenched explanation.
Someone. Is. Flying. Over. My. House. Late at night, like 12:30 a.m. And it goes on and on and makes the house vibrate. Ummmmmm. Eeeeeeeeeeemmm. Buzzzzzz. But none of these come close to describing the actual sound.
It sounds like death. It sounds like doom, it really does. It's a much louder version of the CONSTANT noise I hear during the day. The endless, almost fuzzy-edged, monotone boomy thrum in the background.
Woaaahhhhwwww. Woaaahhhwwww. Woaaahhhhwwww.
I can hear it right now, but I cannot begin to describe it. It's sort of a soft-edged, solid sound. It has a shape. It throbs, but only slightly. If I go outside, it's harder to hear because of all the ambient noise.
At night in our neighborhood, noise comes alive. We hear coyotes out there trilling and barking, and barred owls who scream so loud they sound like apes. Raccoons crash around, tipping things over to rummage for goodies. But these are the wild sounds.
This other. These are human sounds, or rather man-made, machine sounds. Someone is IN that plane, UP there, FLYING it! I keep seeing some Russian spy or someone like that.
I can't think of it as being anything friendly. I just can't.
I have lived with this for, - how long? I tune it out. I really try to.
Someone is watching, and it is not comfortable. And it makes a hellish noise.
OK. Now I've got it! It's like THIS sound!:
It seems to go on most of the night. I might even be hearing it now.
Bentley does NOT like the vacuum cleaner. He likes the carpet cleaner even less. It's rare to see him hide anywhere - he's usually not a fraidy-cat. But here he averages it out: halfway hiding, just peeking over the edge. I wish the light were better here. He doesn't stay long behind it, anyway.
Bentley is the opposite, When we're going out, he dives into his carrier and looks out at us beseechingly, as if to say, "Take me with you!" All right, not beseechingly. He just looks out at us.
Cat lover's note. This song, beloved in my childhood, is somewhat biographical. Bentley came to us from the SPCA, designated as a "stray". These were once called "alley cats", though the term "stray" was floating around to describe missing dogs. I knew very little about Bentley's history. Nobody did. He was about a year old, brought in by someone who found him badly injured, likely mauled by a dog or coyote. We had to piece together his story after the fact: perhaps he had wandered off from somewhere, gone on a little adventure, and become lost. There was nothing remotely feral about him, though - his gentleness and sweetness was immediately apparent, even from his picture.
When I first saw him in his little SPCA cubicle by himself, he jumped down from his high place and ran up to me, looking up at me expectantly. I picked him up, he relaxed in my arms, and it was instant love. When I opened the door to the cat-carrier, he went in there like a shot.
I had my cat. He didn't have any fur on his shoulders, but I could see the healed puncture-marks where he had been so badly bitten. My daughter-in-law looked at him and said, "That's where his wings broke off."
The thing is, we had not even planned to have a cat. At all. The "cat-riarch", Murphy, had lived to be 17, and at that point we said "no more cats". I was into birds then, kept one for eleven years, and when Jasper died I got a new lovebird named Paco, a gorgeous, sweet little lavender-colored thing that I immediately became deeply attached to. The grandkids loved her immensely. When she was only about eight weeks old, I found her dead on the floor of the cage. I never found out what went wrong.
Why a cat? It was unlikely. My daughter had just gotten a new kitten, adorable. She kept saying, oh, c'mon you guys, you're pensioners, you need a cat. One day when I was feeling particularly ripped up about Paco, I said to Bill, "Jesus, we might as well just get a bloody cat."
Bill said, "We could get a cat." He said it hopefully. He said it with a sense of possibility. Perhaps we needed to revisit that "no more cats" decision of years ago.
It didn't take long. The fund of adoptable kittens was small, but Bentley was a year old and home-ready. His manners were impeccable, and my feeling is that he had a good home, but they didn't neuter him, and one day he followed the siren call. A bad thing, or a good thing? It was good for us.
Here is his SPCA mug shot. At this point he was named Theo, so he has had at least three names in his lifetime:
He has been the best cat, I mean, the best. Gentlemanly, self-possessed, even classy, like his name. Yet just as off-kilter and unpredictable as any feline. He is the master of the soft-paw stealth attack. Though the fur grew back on his shoulders where he had been picked up and thrashed, when he leans forward I can see little gaps underneath where the skin was too damaged. I call these his "duelling scars".
Why is Bentley on this blog so much? Hell, I'm getting views for the first time in seven years! But it's more than that. He changed my life. I never expected that, at all.
What is this fat, macho tabby doing in the back yard? Why does he look so much like Bentley? Has our Jedi Master met his (fat, macho) father at last?
Does this mean that Princess Meow-a, the nice fluffy tortie who comes in through the hole in the fence, is really his sister? Probably not, but it's a nice story. I had to voice the part of Darth Vader in this scenario, as the cat was too far away to be heard. Bentley does NOT like me using weird-sounding voices, nor does he like me whistling. He comes up to me, looking anxious. The whites of his eyes show, always a bad sign. Humans are supposed to behave in a certain way, and I repeatedly break those rules. And yet, he still loves me. At least, I think he loves me: here he looks merely alarmed.
There is something about this cat, particularly in closeup. Something almost Zenlike. He came from a hard background, found homeless and skinny and wounded somewhere in Surrey (Surrey!). He has the duelling scars to prove it. It was a long and twisting path to the Gunning household, but he's here to stay. He will own me forever.
Though Bentley is a very sweet cat, he can be kind of unpredictable. He ambushed me when I tried to take a video of him lurking in the Christmas tree (not under). What can I say? He's a cat. That's what they do. No harm was done to the videographer.
