Cat Scientist

Old Lady Cat was a dignified sort of beast, with a tendency to perch atop the highest surface she could find in the vicinity and then stare down upon her minions haughtily, as we scurried about in ant-like fashion under her supervision. For, you know, the entire expanse of five minutes, after which she'd be thoroughly bored with us.

These sorts of behavior are, of course, not exactly unheard-of for snooty cats—is that redundant? I think it is!—but Old Lady Cat was not just any snooty cat: she was also a scientific-minded feline with a penchant for research. A particular favorite involved water glasses.

For as long as I can remember, Old Lady Cat was a hazard around glasses containing water. I'm not sure if it was water, specifically, that drew her attention, or if it was simply that other beverages tended to not be abandoned, and therefore water was "just there."

At first, Old Lady Cat would simply study them, sitting primly in front of a glass, staring down into it, and occasionally tipping her head this way and that, as if memorizing the very molecular structure of water in its liquid state. I sometimes imagine that, had we been able to extract a movie-like thought-speech from her at such a moment, that she would have said, in a female—though still inflection-free—version of Star Trek's famed Mr. Spock, "Fascinating." And then promptly returned to her observations.

But it wouldn't take long before she'd move on to the experimental phase of her investigations. Up would rise one delicate, furry paw, to the very top of the glass, over the rim, and juuuuuuust into the interior space of the glass. And then—I imagined with a little "oop!" not unlike that which Gloria Stuart's character in Titanic dropped that delicious, sparkling bauble she'd kept all those years into the dark depths of the ocean in the last few minutes of that hyper-grandiose film—Old Lady Cat would flick her foot with perfect force to tip the glass over.

Her immaculate fur was never splattered with so much as a single drop of water, at least not in any such experiment that I observed. And I did watch a fair number of these events, as long as the glass wasn't more than a quarter full and was situated in such a place that its contents would drench anything more than the surface of the counter or the like.

Old Lady Cat seemed to get such a kick out of tipping water glasses, you see, and it was just the funniest thing to see her, apparently driven beyond reason to repeat her glass-tipping trick time and time again: "Hmm. A glass of water—fascinating. I wonder what happens if I do ... THIS!" And then lower her paw to sit regally as the water spilled out in rivulets before her: "Oh. I see."

And then, tired by a full schedule of glass-tipping, go take a nap.