Recess! Media

Today, Shelley Fraser Mickle is shedding a whole new light on National Pet Week. 

Yes, it’s that time of year when everything is shedding. And this reminds me of the day when my grandmother invited Mr. Caldwell, our preacher, to lunch, and he said down at the head of the table in Bo Bo’s favorite chair. Bo Bo was my grandmother’s cat. He was white and at least twenty pounds overweight and smelled like the dirt in the crawlspace under the house. Of course, when our preacher, Mr. Caldwell, sat down in Bo Bo’s chair, Bo Bo was still not in it, and yet a good part of him was. For he had recently began shedding his winter coat like it was stolen goods he needed to dump on the run. 

Oh, and it was such a lovely lunch, too, with triple decker sandwiches and sides of slender fingers and congealed fingers that had who knows what in them. The conversation was spectacular, too, since it brought us all up to date on just about everybody in the whole congregation. But when Mr. Caldwell got up to go home, even though he didn’t know it, he was wearing a good bit of Bo Bo’s winter coat. 

My grandmother was horrified. She whispered to me to run get her hairbrush and some adhesive tape. Of course, when I brought them back to her, I thought, now the problem was all hers. For how was she going to come up with an excuse to apply the brush to the preacher’s backside? I come from a clever family, though. It’s a good bit sadistic, too. Because the scheme my grandmother devised to get the cat hair off of Mr. Caldwell without him ever knowing he was wearing it was to tell him that I needed a good hairbrushing, and would he be so kind as to hold me while she went at my long thick hair with a hairbrush. 

For a minute, Mr. Caldwell looked stunned, but then he’d probably been asked to do any number of strange things by members of our congregation. So while he reached out to grab me, my grandmother cleverly wrapped the adhesive tape, sticky side outward, around her hair brush, and whispered to me, “Dance like the devil.” So with every swat at my hair, my grandmother mishit part of me and rolled the brush down the backside of the preacher. 

In ten minutes, I was standing at the door watching Mr. Caldwell walk down the steps without so much as a tell-tale sign of Bo Bo’s hair anywhere on him. At least, not until he opened his car door, and we all saw Bo Bo asleep in the driver’s seat.