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Essays by Karen Anderson: It Was Tuesday

Illustration by Kacie Brown

It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and I wasn’t feeling especially festive. Instead, I was feeling frustrated, standing in line at the grocery store again to pay for the things I’d forgotten yesterday. The line was long and my temper was short. Gratitude was not on my list.

The checkout person was someone I recognized, someone who’s friendly but not always cheerful, someone like me. “How’s your cat?” I asked. It’s the one thing I knew about her, that she had rescued a feral cat a while ago. I’m a Cat Person too, so I thought this question might be a way to demonstrate the cheerfulness I didn’t feel.

“He knows it’s Tuesday,” she said.

This got my attention. “How does he know?” I asked.

“Because I told him,” she said.

I laughed out loud. “Because I told him.” Of course that’s why he knew. Silly me for asking.

Now, maybe it’s not even funny. Maybe I was just yearning for something to lift me out of my funk and here it was, a feral cat who knows it’s Tuesday. Well, you had to be there and I was. It made me laugh and it made me thankful.

Karen Anderson contributes "Essays by Karen Anderson" to Interlochen Public Radio.