Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Vintage

The mere vin ordinaire.


Oliver samples the bath water.

Excellent!

Clearly he would not drink so deep if it were not up to his standard. He does not drink unused bathwater any more than you or I would drink a Chardonnay that has not spent its time in oak.

Soap. Flakes of abraded skin. Ink -- particularly ink from the New York Times -- first seeped from its pages and then scrubbed from fingers. Sweat. Dirt and a hint of certain precious bodily fluids depending on the terroir.

Head up! He's thinking. Over to the toilet, up on the seat, paws down inside the bowl for the pleasure of comparison, though contrast is more like it. Toilet bowl water -- mere vin ordinaire but infinitely preferable to tap water in a bowl, the grape juice of household drinkables, mere eau d'ennui.

Palate calibrated, Oliver returns to the tub, flicks his tongue, savors, lifts his head, wonders if he has the aqueous version of a milk mustache, dabs at his face with his paw.

A good tub, an excellent tub, in fact, but ephemeral. A fine tub is in some ways like a Beaujolais, meant to be drunk young.

You can't lay it down, which is unfortunate.

1 comment:

Kathleen Crighton said...

In Cattown, several of the cats need a drink of water every evening before we go to bed. Some insist that I leave the tap running so they can lap it. Others want it drawn in a pool in the bathroom sink, where they delicately put their paws in it to make sure how deep it is before drinking. And I wonder why my water bill is so high.