Post a Comment On: A Nod to Nothing

[Image]While we were at Half Price books, I noticed there was a "classical" kids clearance section: books that are really old and at a reduced price. The one that caught my eye was "That's Our Cleo! And Other Stories About Cats" (Amazon...ours has a different cover with a boy and his siamese) from 1966. I find it a little creepy that the boy on the cover looks slightly like me when I was a kid...(ut oh, guess that means I better take a picture)...but then I think he's meant to look like your average brown-haired late-60's kid. Then again, he doesn't have a big birthmark over his left eyebrow, so the resemblance is really rather limited.

The first story, about Cleo, is how Cleo is actually scamming three different sets of owners for food under different aliases, all the while getting fatter and fatter, so fat she can't even jump from garbage can to garbage can or off the footstool. I was amused to see that one set of owners were Joe and Bob, "young bachelors" who "cooked all kinds of good things" like whitefish in caper sauce, tuna fish with cream and crab-meat salad and who named Cleo "Juliet". A couple of pages later when Bob takes "Juliet" to the vet and the vet suspects he's seen Juliet/Cleo before, Bob replies, "Oh, no, I don't think so...My friend and I live together and this is our cat."

Damning evidence if you ask me. Not that I care. Joe and Bob could just as well be Wanda Wisdom and Miss Richfield and their cat, and I'd still read it to Eryn, it's just amusing to see what looks like it might be subtext in a kids '60's cat tales book.