The ' Cat' food '' / 猫食
One day I churned for a long time in the store room in my garden, looking for something I needed. Finally I failed to find the thing I looked for, but happened to find a pack of “cat’s food” bought for Kitty a long time ago. ( Kitty was a cat I had raised before).
At the time long before the day, my Dutch was extremely poor. Each time when I went to the super markets, I had to look at the goods first till I made them clear before buying. Of course sometimes I did blind shopping too. Then I had Kitty with me. Watching her growing day by day, I thought I could not always feed her with the milk either remained or expired. So I went to a super market to buy her some cat’s food. There was a zone special for animal food in the market. And there were a lot of boxes and bags there, big or small in various colors with different prices, which had really made me headache. All I felt was that the food for cats was more expensive than that for people. I was afraid that to feed a cat with the cat’s food might probably make me impoverished. Hesitated as I was, I saw a big bag nearby with a picture of a cat on the outside packing. In that picture there was a lovely cat in a status of satisfactory, proud and fully fed. This had made me confident that it was no doubt a kind of cat’s food. The price was only 2 Euros more, with no more consideration, I bought one bag of that, which I was sure would be enough for Kitty in the coming two or three months.
Soon after I returned home, I put some “cat’s food” in Kitty’s bowl. She came and smelt it, then walked away. I couldn’t make out why she was not interested in the food. Maybe she had no appetite? So I smelt the food too, but really had smelt nothing. No wonder Kitty did not like it, the cheaper food was never good in quality. Thinking like this as I did, I poured some milk into the bowl. Soaked with milk, the “cat’s food” remained unchanged, hard still. Kitty walked towards again, licked a bit of milk then went away. I remembered that in my childhood, I often heard old people saying that cats were greedy. And people also like to call those picky children as “greedy cats”. So I murmured: ok, you don’t eat it now. And I will see if you eat it or not later when you are hungry.
The next morning when I looked at Kitty’s bowl, I found the milk was drunk while the “cat’s food” remained still, not even a piece of it had been eaten. Well, the “cat’s food” might be too cheap to arouse her appetite I thought.
That afternoon my friend Geesje came to see me on her way back from a super market. She was very white. So I gave her a nickname as white rabbit. She always wondered why was it that a white thing should be a rabbit but not something else. When we had a free chat, she saw the “cat’s food” in the bowl. She was quite puzzled and asked me what I intended to do with it. I told her that Kitty would not eat the “food” as it was bad in quality. She laughed till squatted down and even could not stand up… As matter of fact, the “cat’s food” were sands for cats. The sands were used by cats to burry their excretion.
Actually I was misled by the picture on the bag. I had misunderstood the status of that cat on the picture. Maybe that was an expression shown by the cat after defecation.
Since then, Gessje always calls me jokingly as “a stupid artist from China”. Of course I don’t think I am stupid.
