This Week With Charley: The Mystery of the Mouse With the Hawaiian Shirt

(The continuing adventures of the little black cat that Tim sent me the day after he passed. -jb)

This week with Charley, our little black cat somehow managed to find a toy mouse that’s been missing for months. When Charley first arrived at the house, one of the first toys I bought her was a mouse with a Hawaiian shirt. Two mice with Hawaiian shirts, actually.

She played with them for about a month, and then both mice went missing. I don’t know where they went. But the other day, I noticed that one had returned and she’d brought it onto her chair in the living room.

Yes, she has her own chair. We all do. When my son Will and I are watching TV, she’ll climb into her chair and watch with us, all of us in our respective chairs.

Anyway, here she is with the aforementioned mouse. “You’re not taking my mouse,” she says. By the way, the other mouse is still missing.

Remember when I couldn’t get her to hang out with me on her desk bed while I’m working? That’s over now. Whenever I’m at my computer, she’s on her desk bed.

And as the managing editor of Old Mission Gazette, she takes her required afternoon naps very seriously. (In that first picture, that’s not the mouse with the Hawaiian shirt. That’s another mouse with a feathery tail.)

Sometimes, she’ll take naps with her feet in the air or her whole body upside down.

And sometimes, she just likes to sit with her front feet outside of her bed.

As mentioned here, there’s been a lot of discussion about what color Charley actually is. On a peripheral glance, she looks black, but in the right light, she looks brown or gray. My friend, Molly Stretten (they own Devil’s Dive Vineyard), said that all black cats are actually tabby cats.

Once she told me that, now every time I look at Charley, I just see a tabby cat cloaked in black fur. Or brown or gray, depending on the light.

And remember when I mentioned that she looks tiny just wandering around the house, but that she has the freaky ability to stretch into a super-long cat? I wasn’t kidding. Here she is doing what we call her “stretchy-stretches.” She’s like a slinky.

Stay tuned for next week, when she decides to become a tight-rope walker. Sort of.

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