When I was a kid my family had this cat, a crazy old Siamese feline who was convinced she was a dog.
She was so convinced she was a dog she learned to bark and chase cars with the two family dogs.
When these two muttly brown and white canines, charged the fence of the gray tiled house to bark at strangers as they passed, the cat would charge along with them meowing for all she was worth. I think she even tried to catch a frisby once and this was 1965 or so when the frisbies were much larger.
Now keep in mind, that unless they are literally selaed in somehow, it is fairly easy for a cat to escape the average house and/or fenced yard and several times she would do so standing outside the fence to meow her displeasure at the passersby in a very canine like manner.
Eventually, when it was clear that her "fellow canines" could not make it across that chain link barrier as easily as she could and after being stared at and ignored or laughed at by the passersby she would give up and retreat into the safety of her fenced in dog yard where her dogness would be accepted. She even peed on a fence post one time, lifting her leg in such a dog like manner that for a minute I actually began to believe she was indeed a short, pointed eared, black faced dog with retractable claws rather than a mentally ill and deluded feline.
Fast foward more than 40 years to one of my family's current dogs Reddy, a cute 50 pound ball of red short haired energy.
She is part boxer, part hound and a bright ball of nerves and urine and teeth. She was kept in a kennel the first part of her life because she peed every time she became the slightest bit excited which was often and chewed on everything.
When first released from her kennel first she walked in and out of its open door several times and sat down and turned to look at the door waiting for it to be closed for the night so she could go to sleep.
After a while we removed the kennel all together and without her box to hide in she huddled next to my wife and I often squeezing in between us to get that same comfortable feel of being closed in.
Our other dog, Spazz, was raised as an outside dog and spent his early years chasing other dogs away from the two acre lot we owned at the time. Because of that experience he simply cannot stand the sight or smell of any other canine anywhere near his two acres of land which is unfortunate since we now live in a 900 square foot apartment surrounded by other people and their dogs with equal determination to protect their plot of land.
We constantly have to pull him away from other dogs so his angry old butt will not get in a fight with some neighbir's innocent cocker spaniel. He is also quite honestly getting to long in the tooth to be be scrapping with the Pit Bulls and Great Danes that populate the complex where we live and is to stubborn to change.
The point of all this rambling is a discovery I have made about fences. Not the white picket fence kind or the silver gray cyclone kind or even the nice upper class brick and stone kind. Its the kind we build in our childhoods to protect us from harm and the kind we end up carrying around with us the rest of our lives, hanging around our necks like some kind of ghostly psychic albatross.
In that process the very thing that protects us fences us in, later becoming so familiar that it becomes almost a mental security blanket tattooed into our minds with indelible psychic ink in ways that little, short of some kind of space alien mind wipe, can change.
After awhile because of the security this fence has provided us the security blanket becomes what we love. After all one of the reasons we love our parents is the security, both physical and emotional, they provide us.
Given time what we love becomes what we love the most. Thusly in this Herculean tragedy of the mind and heart, the thing that hems us in, that limits us in sometimes tragic ways becomes, against all logic and sense of self preservation and sanity, the thing we love the most. It also becomes something we hold onto with all our might because we simply cannot bear to let go of the security blanket that has served us so well through the years.
I don't remember what became of the cat exactly but years later there was a rumor circulated among my pack of siblings and I that the cat had tried chasing cars once to often and was finally done in by her canine ways.
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