Last night the husband and I were grocery shopping. I had just tossed a bag of dry cat food into the cart when he said, "Oh! What is it that you used to feed them?" I had no idea what he was talking about and pointed to another dry food that I had switched them from because I thought it was making Sam the Fattest Cat Alive pukey. (I was mistaken. Apparently, being alive makes Sam pukey, not food.)
"No, not that," he said. "The stuff in the cans."
The cans? I thought. I haven't fed them canned food in...well probably over a year and a half. I stopped because A) people told me just dry food was better for them (I'm still not sold...Sam T.F.C.A still has, and I do not say this lightly, the worse breath ever to come out of any living thing's mouth, and he's still pukey, and fat...but you know, we love him anyway) and B)they seemed to not like it so much anymore (I was down to giving them a quarter of a can each per day, which they didn't even finish most of the time).
If I may speak tangentially for a moment--because I know this has been such a straightforward story so far--let me tell you that when I stopped feeding them canned food--which I used to do every morning, when I got up--one of them (I thought it was Sherry but I have reason now to believe that it may sometimes have been Sam T.F.C.A.) would sit outside our closed bedroom door (when the husband and I started living together, he mandated that they not be allowed in the bedroom, which I am fine with, because I had enough years of waking up with one or more cats sleeping literally over all my available airways) and CRY its little head off. I mean, meows like someone was dying out in the kitchen. They wanted the canned food. But I didn't give it to them, insisting that eventually, the crying would stop. It hasn't, to this day--generally it's Sherry, and she's only crying because she wants me to get out of bed and, say, go look at the closed patio door in the living room--which is actually really irritating.
Anyway. So at the grocery store last night, the husband asks which kind of canned food they'd used to eat, so I point out Friskies, with the clarification that they won't eat anything sliced/gravied/shredded/etc. He picks up two cans and puts them in the cart, and I ask what they are for. He says that since he has been home with an injury for a couple of weeks, they have been keeping him company, and he wants to give them a treat. My little heart is touched by the sentiment, though in the back of my head, I fear that we should not fool with the canned food, because they seem to have forgotten about it and perhaps, that's for the best.
But he is insistent, so we buy it. Later that night, he busts it out and gives each cat half a can. At first they seem to not even know what it is--he had to pick them up and put them next to it for them to even pay attention--but once they did? Holy crap. Sam T.F.C.A. dug right in, but he kept turning around to look at Sherry, like he was afraid she would steal it. When he was done--and he only ate half of it, which sincerely impressed me--he walked directly over to the husband, stared at him for a minute, then laid down at his feet and rolled around and purred. So freaking cute!
Sherry wolfed hers down, and while Sam was making with the warm fuzzies, she finished his off as well. She did not come over to say thank you, but she spent about five minutes sitting nearby, licking her lips. For
five minutes. Seriously.
This may sound like a stupid story by a crazy old cat lady, but it warmed my heart, I tell you. Not just because I thought it was very sweet of my husband, but because the cats (Sam T.F.C.A. especially--though he does generally regard the husband as though they are best friends) actually seemed to appreciate it. Well, I mean, as much as Sherry can appreciate anything.
