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When I was a boy I often passed an old Victorian house down the street. Nothing but young women lived there that I could tell, and they often met their "beaus" on the back porch. They acted so furtive I just knew they were sneaking their boyfriends in the house without their momma seeing them. I thought it was a good joke on "Momma."
My best friend, Buggy, was a couple of years older than I and correspondingly mature in my eyes. He knew everything, as befit his superior age. I think at that time I was about ten and he was twelve. One day I gigglingly (that's what ten-year-old boys do is giggle a lot, especially when they talk about girls) told Buggy about how slick those girls were at sneaking their boyfriends in the back door.
He snorted, "Don't you know nothing? That's a cathouse." I thought that was the same thing as a cattery. Believe it or not, that stopped me dead in my tracks. That started a whole new chain of thought going. Obviously that made the guys sneaking in the back door of the old house customers come to buy cats. So why were they sneaking in after dark? Now instead of a little innocent hand-holding in the parlor behind Momma's back, the girls were plotting to sell the old woman's cats and keep the money.
I rushed home and told Mom what skullduggery was afoot at the crossroads, but instead of being suitably outraged at such behavior, she thought it was funny. So did all the neighbors when she told them. It didn't help that to me in that day and time the words "pussy" and "cat" were interchangeable and became mixed in the telling of what I imagined was going on over at Mable's house on Branch St. in Sherman, Texas, in 1951.
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