DELILAH’S INCREDIBLE JOURNEY

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It was your typical day at work - return a few phone calls, respond to a couple of e-mails, find your cat that’s been missing for six weeks.

Yes, Delilah is back, and she did it in Incredible Journeyish fashion. Six weeks after she bolted from Chez Gibbons, she made her triumphant return to our presence by showing up where I work. I have three theories as to how she ended up at my place of work, several miles from home:

1. She climbed in my car, and I inadvertently drove her there.

2. She is exceptionally smart and just figured out where I worked.

3. Aliens transported her there.

I am pretty sure that it was No. 1. My guess is that she rode up there and just hung around my work for a while. When she escaped from our house, she weighed 12 pounds. When I found her, she was down to seven pounds. I could probably market that kind of remarkable weight loss program. ("Do you need to lose 40 percent of your body weight in six weeks? With my new Live Under a Business and Eat Roaches and Shrews Diet, you can reach your goal!")

We took her to our vet (well, she’s not technically OUR vet; she treats the animals) who said Delilah was, for the most part, healthy. She said that the main problem was that her liver (Delilah’s, not the vet’s) was not functioning at what is apparently normal cat level. (Delilah apparently boozed it up during her absence.) To get her back to a weight more suited to her skin, we would have to feed her special food and also give her liquid steroids. So, if you come to my house and see Delilah holding the couch over her head, you’ll know why.

Because she is now accustomed to finer foods (squirrel parts, banana peels covered in coffee grounds and dragged from a dumpster, diapers), she thumbs her nose at traditional store-bought cat food (as well as a cat can thumb). So, my wife and I get the joyous experience of force feeding our cat using a syringe. It is a not-so-melodious sound when a cat begins to wail and moan in response to having mushed tuna and chicken shoved down her throat. Our vet assures us we will only have to do this for a little while. I assure her of that as well.

But, despite the bum liver and the really flabby skin, Delilah’s most disturbing change is one that you cannot measure, unless you were counting wounds. As you remember from previous columns, Delilah was, oh, what’s a nice way to put it, evil as evil gets. (For those of you who did not read the previous columns, consider your confusion your punishment. And NEVER miss a column again, understand?)

Now, Delilah is an entirely different cat, behavior-wise. (Yes, I’m sure I brought our cat home, and not someone else’s, perhaps some little girl’s, and little Mary now asks her mom, "Mommy, what happened to Fluffy" and her mother has no choice but to answer, "Oh, sweetie, you didn’t clean your room, so Fluffy ran away to punish you" and Mary turns to the only things that can bring her peace - armed robbery and crack. Don’t blame me for Mary’s indiscretions. I got my cat.)

(Editor’s note: Medication should be kicking in three, two, one...)

Anyway, Delilah is now about the sweetest cat in the world. That was one serious six-week attitude adjustment. She has yet to claw, scratch, stab, shoot, or generally maim a single person. Instead, she just curls up in people’s laps and purrs. (True, she doesn’t do this when we are forcing Fancy Cat Delight down her throat, but she doesn’t whip out the razors either, which she used to do just for fun. Now, she has a reason to try and rip our flesh from the bones, yet she refrains.)

My wife thinks that our cat’s drastic mood swing stems from her upbringing. You see, we got our cat when she was a little tiny kitten, and she had never been around her mother. All of her life, she had never wanted or needed or any of that stuff. Until her six-week jaunt, she had never known dependence and now truly appreciates what we do for her.

I just laugh and laugh at such a notion. The truth, of course, is that anger is directly proportionate to body fat. The fatter they are, the meaner they are. Look at Jabba the Hutt. I rest my case.

Of course, another theory which bears discussion is that she has not become a kinder, gentler Delilah, but is simply biding her time until she gets back to her fighting weight, at which point she will methodically kill my wife and me for making her live on the street for six weeks. Bottom line, though, is that I’m glad to have my cat back. I just hope she’s not planning on getting even.