There is a certain lovely “quiet” to a Sunday morning that is always so enjoyable to people who wake Monday through Friday and listen to traffic reports and spend Saturday morning’s fighting off the brain-piercing drone of neighborhood lawnmowers and leaf blowers.
It’s so quiet on a Sunday morning that you can hear nature. Or, to borrow a phrase from the past, you can hear yourself think.
And, if you are enjoying the quiet morning in your living room, you may hear a whisper from a not-so-identifiable source. Could it be the conscience of your lapsed Baptist soul telling you it’s time to dress for church? You’ll look at your quiet spouse, Martha, and note that she’s sitting on the couch and cradling the giant bejowled noggin of adoring and adorable Hambone Jack, a big dog with a big heart.
The other dogs are silent, some asleep, some watching the humans as if there were about to be a secret hand-signal to launch a morning drive through the neighborhood. The traditional squirrel population-monitoring excursion.
And, yet, just under the surface of the silence is a mumbling. A not quite perceptible stream of human voice. During the night has our planet moved dangerously close to slipping into another dimension and is conversation from that Other World echoing into ours?
A quick glance around the room yields the answer to this mystery: Poirot, the black and white cat, has managed to take a sitting position atop our fancy radio/CD player and his backside has activated the “on” button at a low level.
Now, Poirot, having heard enough, has moved on and it is left to the humans to turn off the radio. He likes a quiet morning, one where you can hear yourself think though, sometimes, I wonder if this strange cat is listening to us think. He seems to be quite the contemplative cat. If he’d like a little music with his morning, he knows how to get it: Take a seat and listen.
