PROBING THE ANCIENT MYSTERY OF LIFE: JUST WHAT IS THAT RASCALLY CAT THINKING????

[ PREFACE: The gentleman in the smaller photo is our Senior Office Cat William Powell, a constant advisor for years. He was not involved in this event and asked me to make sure that Dear Readers understand that he is prone to being well-behaved. There’s the notice. He is a gentleman. Now, inspired by life with cats and the hit country song, I’ve Got Cats In High Places, we present this weekend’s edition. FYI: William and Stevie Ray have bunked together since the arrival of the loud and darning kitten. Match made in the old neighborhood.]
Here’s a question that’ll get us started for this weekend edition of Let Sleeping Dogs Lie & Napping Cats Nap:
“What in the world is going through that cat’s mind?” And, yes, the next photo is of a scene that stunned me. Read on. I recovered. -- Larry
[LARRY NOTE: As William Powell The Cat once told me, “A picture is worth a thousand words but they won’t explain a thing if a cat’s involved.”]

As many a catfan want will testify, “what’s in that cat’s mind” is is one of the great mysteries of human life!"
You bring a cat into your home and you immediatly begin wondering about what’s going through that cat’s mind.
We’ve had this particular car since sometime in 2018 when I heard a kitten angrily yowling from an eye-level flimsy mimosa branch in the poorly maintained (blame me!) shrubbery in our Dallas yard.
Ever try to pull a six-to-8-week old stubborn kitten out off of a tree branch? You might as well be trying to pick yourself up off the floor by pulling straight up on your shoestrings. This guy was a struggle, a tiny hairy ball of determination and mouth!
No other cats were around, but we think he was one of the members of the last feral litter in our yard — we’d been trapping, neutering and returning for about 20 years and it had been a while since we’d seen kittens dining at our front porch twice-daily feline buffet.
I named this guy after a celebrity from our side of Dallas (Stevie Ray Vaughan) and the place the kitten was found. Hence he is “Stevie Ray Treeboy."
[LARRY NOTE: Yes, that is my Personal Dog Porche Noel guarding the door so that no cats or dogs woud enter to help Stevie Ray with his high-jinx. (Intentional mispelling of hijinx - fyi, larry.]
Move along from years ago and you get to one day this week when I happened to walk down the hall to enter my far-from-neatly organized home office.
And that’s how I got that first photo of Stevie Ray standing on the back of my office chair. Something was going through his mind — it may have been a question: “Can I swat those light switches?” Or it might have been, “Can I squeeze onto the fanblade, turn the fan on to low and take a calm, quiet right on the merry-cat- go-round?”

Neither was the answer.
He got down. Then, a few minutes later, he went to the office window, flipped over and went to sleep and became The Stereotypical Napping Cat, which, I believe, is a Broadway musical he and William Powell are working on in their spare time.
That final photo is one of Stevie Ray's baby pictures. He was so cute in elementary school.
[NOTE FROM SENIOR OFFICE CAT WILLIAM POWELL: Thank you for reading this far into our weekend feature. Stevie Ray and I hope to have the musical written and choreographed for Broadway by this autumn. Neither of us has seen Cats. Our working title is Tap Dancing Cats On a Hot Tin Roof. The lawyers are helping us with that.]
[DEAR READERS, Please send photos of your slumbering dogs or snoozing cats or any other sleep-prone critter in your home to [email protected] and we’ll spotlight the happy sleepers/nappers/in-laws in our weekend edition of the long-running feature Let Sleeping Dogs Lie & Napping Cats Nap. We’re big fans of cats and dogs and the people who they put up with — er, the people who love them.]