Laugh of the Day

I just got a holiday newsletter from author & BP101 alum Karen Quinn. In honor of the writers' strike--or so she says--Karen recycled tidbits from holiday newsletters past. This one, from 2001, cracked me up:

This year, we lost our beloved cat, Kitty Quinn, who thought he could fly, but found out the hard way that he couldn’t. [Note: After Kitty died, the custodian in our building wrapped his body in a black plastic bag and threw it out. We weren’t able to find the body despite some serious digging. Husband Mark was traveling and I told him over the phone that Kitty had died. He thought I said, “Mimi died.” Mimi was my 95-year-old grandmother who was in a nursing home in Texas.]

Mark said, “That’s not so unexpected. What happened?”

I told him, “She jumped out the window.”

“What?!” Mark said, “So it was suicide.”

“You could say that,” I said.

“When is the funeral?” Mark asked.

“That’s the terrible part,” I said. “There won’t be a funeral. They wrapped her body in a Hefty bag and threw it in the trash.”

We then realized that we were not talking about the same loved one.

Bella's Note:
My NYC cat, Sheila, a tiger calico picked up on the Bowery (pre-Whole Foods), was a true aerialist. I had a screen in the fire-escape window to prevent her running downstairs to attack other cats in their own apartments. She got around that by leaping out the unscreened window--six flights up, with 10-foot ceilings--and through the bars on the fire escape a good six feet away. I soon put up another screen, to save my life as much as hers. I thought I'd have a heart attack the first time I saw her leap--then I had to grab her off the fire escape before she went gunning for the neighbors' cats again. P.S. She was felled by kidney failure at 13.