The Cat Lady

When I was in high school, I was absolutely certain that I would get married as soon as I graduated.

This did not happen.

When I was in college, I just knew that I would get married my junior year.

This also did not happen.

The first time I got my license renewed, I was positive I would be married by the year 2000 (at approximately the same time everything on The Jetsons came true).

I began to be discouraged.

When I was a senior in college, I made a pact with my best looking and most reasonable guy friend that I would marry him if I reached age 30 without an engagement ring.

I really should find his phone number.

One night, drunk off Emily Dickinson's finest poetry and Vivarin, I giggled with a friend in the dorm hallway.

"If I'm not married within the next eight months, I will turn into The Cat Lady," I declared with an inebriated grin. Here follows the elaborate tale spun that night. If only I had known ...

If I'm not married within the next eight months, I will turn into The Cat Lady.

The Cat Lady roams the streets of Backwoods, TN, pushing her shopping cart (because all
crazy people have shopping carts) that she stole from the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly.
Stray cats of all shapes and colors follow The Cat Lady, because it's sort of required, given
her name.

During the day, The Cat Lady rolls her cart along the sidewalk and knocks on the door of
random houses, and sweetly asks the resident, "Do you have any tuna fish for my little
babies?" Beware the unlucky, unloving person who attempts to shut the door in The Cat
Lady's face, because then she pulls out the Hex Fingers. That's pretty much pointing the
index and middle fingers at the door, giving it a nasty look, and then walking away. The
Cat Lady is pretty imaginative, but she doesn't have actual magic powers. But that house
might have a lot of cat poo on the lawn in the morning.

Parents will scare their children with tales of The Cat Lady. "If you don't eat your lima
beans," they will say, "The Cat Lady will come and get you!" And the children will gulp and
eat their lima beans with determined resignation, because no one wants to be kidnapped
by The Cat Lady.

About here is where the Vivarin started to wear off, or I passed out, one, and I don't remember the rest of it. What I do know is that I'm almost thirty now, and I have a cat, and I am scoping out the shopping carts in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot.