Sam and My Thing

Sam and I are back to doing our ‘thing’.

What is this ‘thing?’ It is Sam half-sitting on my lap while I sit on the folding mattress in our living room. Half-sit? Well, the front half of his body would be on the left side of my lap, whereas his rear portion would rest on the mattress. Sounds stranger than it looks, actually. I would move to the right side of the mattress to make room for him. He would sit like that for minutes, even half an hour or more at a time, with me scratching his ears and neck. He’d purr with joy.

We haven’t done this since moving to the new house. In the previous house where we stayed, we had placed the mattresses along the wall opposite to the TV. So, when I watched TV or worked on my laptop, he would come and half-sit on my lap.

In the new house, we have cane armchairs across from the TV and the mattresses are relegated to a side wall. I hadn’t started working on my laptop at home either due to several reasons until recently. So, Sam tried to repeat his trick of half-sitting on my lap with the armchairs without much success. And he does not like to sit fully on my lap for reasons best known to him.

This, I think, bothered him a lot though I didn’t realise just how much until today. I’ll be lying if I say that I didn’t miss it either. I’m also beginning to wonder whether the absence of this routine is not behind his recent instances of disobedience and mischief.

Now I’m back on the mattress with my laptop and Sam is back with me. From the top of his pink nose with the funny black Charlie Chaplin like mark under it to the tip of his ringed brown-grey tail, he personifies a happy kitty. He is purring away like nobody’s business as I scratch his ears, while I’m hoping that he will now stop demonstrating some of the mischievous behaviours he has started showing in the last month and a half.