CALL ME SNAKE

Today we’re introducing a new feature here at Call Me Snake. We like introducing new features here at Call Me Snake, as “new features” tend to rank very high in our focus groups and informal polling, as well as in casual conversations with “the man on the street” (say, for example, on his way to get junk food in the mid-afternoon). I think it’s fair to say that introducing new features is one of the things that Call Me Snake does best. It may even be our forte’.

Anyway, getting back to our new feature which is called “Flotsam&Jetsam,” in case you haven’t already guessed. The name is pretty self-explanatory, it seems to me. Rather than try to belabor the obvious, I think we should just get on it with it and all will be clear very soon if it’s not already so.

First, I want to say a word about my cat “Sunshine,” who is the one who is not missing. (That one, the missing one I mean, is called “Moonshine.” One reader already has complained about the names. In my defense, and in defense of the cats, I can say they were named by girls who at the time were just 2- and 5-years-old. But is such a defense really necessary? What’s so bad about “Sunshine” and “Moonshine,” apart from the fact that Moonshine is AWOL and possibly dead?)

Anyway, about our cat “Sunshine”–she is, I think, a pretty extraordinary creature. This evening, for example, I was doing a puzzle. I should say I was doing a puzzle that our younger girl (now 3) had dumped on the living room floor before being dragged, kicking & screaming, up to her bedroom for our unfailingly pleasant bedtime ritual. Sunshine took a particular interest in this puzzle and seemed to want to help. (She is a curious creature, in addition to being “pretty extraordinary,” and gets up on the counter when I wash the dishes. She seems to want to help with this chore, as well.) The last piece in the puzzle was a cat, and Sunshine came up and looked at it closely, and seemed to sniff it. Or maybe she was just sniffing my hand that might have had some weird scent on it, not that I intentionally go around applying weird scents.

Well, that’s all I have to say on this subject. And that, not coincidentally, brings us to the end of the first installment of our new feature, “Flotsam & Jetsam.” I hope you’ve all enjoyed it as much as the rest of us here at “Call Me Snake” have.