Being a Glad You Ate

   Well, I just tried on my graduation gown.

   It's about ordinary, I guess, shiny thin black fabric, with the funny hat. Fits pretty well.

  Felt like Snoopy pretending to be a vulture or the Red Baron, though; "Here comes Wesley the graduate, all set to take on the world and go off to college..."

    There's this paragraph from "Upchuck and the Rotten Willy", by Bill Wallace, that is really good. Actually, the whole book is great; it's pretty short, only 101 pages, this cat's the narrator, one of his best friends, Louie, got smushed by a car crossed the highway one day. Then his other best friend, Tom, moves away, and THEN, to make things even worse, His Katie leaves and goes someplace called "college". And there's this enormous dog the size of a bear who moves in nearby....It's a book for kids, he used to be a school principal. I read it for the first time when I was about six or seven, probably fifteen times in the years since, it's that kind of book, filled with great descriptive paragraphs like this:

   "I wonder how long forever is.
   It was a people word. The first time that I heard it was when my Katie and Chuck held paws and played kissy-face on the front porch. They told each other that they would be together - forever.
   Chuck didn't stay around that long.
   My Katie and Jimmy said the same stuff about being in love - forever. Jimmy had been around for a long time. A lot longer than I liked.
   Come to think of it, I didn't really know how long forever was. I thought that it was a long, long time. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe people didn't know how long forever was, either - and people animals know a lot. They can talk with mouth noises and they can even read signs and stuff.
   That's a lot. But maybe nobody knows how long forever is.
    Maybe it wasn't as long as I thought.

   On the way back home, we didn't bound and leap across the vacant field behind my house - we waddled. At the street, Tom stopped and looked both ways. Then we waddled across. We waddled clear to his front porch where we sat and washed our faces with our paws.
   To be honest, I didn't wash my face too well. I had sucked a really long piece of spaghetti into my mouth. The tail end of it flipped me on the eyebrow. I cleaned that off, as well as the gooey red stuff near my ears. But I left some of the meat sauce on my whiskers. That way, when I licked my lips, I could taste it all day. We curled up and slept in the sun for the rest of the afternoon.
   It was the very next day when "forever" started getting shorter and shorter.
   My Katie left.

   My Katie had left before. I had come to live with her when I was just a kitten. Almost every day, she had left for a place called school. She told me she was a Senior and that "seniors are really cool." I didn't know what a senior was, but being one made my Katie happy - so I was happy, too.
   Going to school had been okay. When my Katie had come home, she played with me. She dragged an old sock round and round on her bed while I chased it. She hugged me and petted me and rubbed behind my ears. At night I slept on her pillow, next to her. Then, after a few months, my Katie had told me she was a "Glad You Ate." Now, I had no idea what a glad you ate was. My Katie had told me that she was happy to be one - only us cats don't just listen with our ears. We watch and feel and smell. My Katie made mouth noises that said she was happy, only the feel she gave off was happy and sad and worried, all rolled together. She smelled confused and uncertain - like maybe being a senior had been more fun than being a glad you ate - only she didn't know for sure."