Poor Clifford. Clifford just had his very first date, and it did not go well.

“That happens,” I told him. “It just wasn’t right. It’s nothing about you.”

It wasn’t a date-date. It was a play date. Clifford’s only six months old. He has play dates all the time with his sister Wally. He and Wally play hard a dozen times a day and probably all night too. This play date wasn’t his idea. It wasn’t mine either. It was my friend Margaret’s. Margaret got a cat a few years ago that hasn’t quite blossomed in the way Margaret had hoped. Beulah is a cautious cat. She’s a stay-behind-the-sofa cat. She registers middlin’ on the amiability index. Beulah has many fine qualities but they’re kind of secret.

So, Margaret reasoned, maybe Beulah is bored, or lonely, and maybe what she needs is another cat to play with. That’s problematic of course. If you bring a new cat into a house with a resident legacy cat, you might end up stuck with two really pissed-off cats and you’ll have to check your shoes for presents for the remainder of your days.

There’s never any guarantee of these things, but, Margaret reasoned, if Clifford came over as a test case, and Beulah allowed it, she might at least be open to such a proposition. Clifford is the original safe cat. Clifford loves everybody. His sister Wally is his very favorite person, unless he gets in my lap and then I am his very favorite person, or if Margaret or (pretty much) anyone else comes into the house and then they’re his favorite person. If Clifford gets into my lap with Wally he is nearly obliterated by joy.

Wally’s affectionate also, but she’s very busy. She is still working out how to scale an eight-foot wall to get to the cross-piece with all the fragile pottery on it, and Clifford just
watches her from the floor in flat admiration. “Go-o-lly, Wally, I didn’t know we could do that,” he says. Basically, Clifford is Gomer Pyle.

So at the appointed time, I opened the door to the cat crate and Clifford strolled into it. He’ll do that, because he’s Clifford, and nothing bad has ever happened to him in his whole life. Even that one time at the vet’s, all he ended up with was a nice snooze and an aerodynamic ball sack. I took him to the car. Right away, he realized something was horribly wrong.

Wally wasn’t in there with him.

Wally’s the talker of the two, but he had plenty to say on the way over to Margaret and Beulah’s. He had not spent one minute of his life without Wally. I carried him into Margaret’s house and we decided to leave him in the crate and see if Beulah approached. After a bit, a furtive shadow appeared around the corner, and she crept over to the crate, hunkering low, newly fat tail sweeping the ground like a bottle-brush. Then came the preliminary growl. Then the amped-up growl. Then the ominous warble of danger with hiss and spit beats. Clifford had nothing to contribute in response. Clifford was appalled.

We thought maybe my presence was throwing Beulah off so I offered to take a stroll and check in later. Margaret opened the crate. A half hour later, I called. “How’s it going?” I asked.

“Clifford would like to go home now,” Margaret reported, briefly.

I took Clifford home. All evening he held back. Even when Wally hopped into my lap, he sat over by the wall and held back. Something had gone wrong. Was he being punished? Did I not like him anymore?

I commiserated. I told him about how Becky and Carol and I were best friends in sixth grade and we did everything together and then one day they both quit talking to me and I never, ever knew what had happened. I withdrew. I became depressed. I simply had no reference point for any of this. I had three siblings and none of them was ever mean to me for even one second. I still don’t know what happened, but I learned to accept that these things do happen. It’s part of growing up, I explained to Clifford. Life isn’t always going to be…

Whump.

Oh! He’s back! My big bag of Clifford pudding is back in my lap. Vibrating with joy