WONDER WHY THAT PEANUT BUTTER SEEMS CRUNCHIER THAN USUAL?

Today was pretty much an average day for me, except I might have eaten a cockroach this morning and a cat climbed on my head late in the afternoon.

How the cockroach thing happened: I decided to make myself a peanut butter and sliced banana sandwich for breakfast. So I grabbed the multi-grain brain from off the top of the refrigerator, undid that twist-tie thing on the bag, took out two slices, tied the bag back up, and prepared the aforementioned sandwich. I ate it. It was delicious.

But, when I went to put the bread back where I got it from, I happened to glance down at the bag, and something from within the layer of translucent plastic managed to catch my eye. Guess what it was. That’s correct, it was a cockroach. A small bugger, about the size and shade of a watermelon seed, only scampering around the outside of the bread (A feat I have yet to see a watermelon seed duplicate).

Feeling somewhat disconcerted, I turned the loaf of bread around and around in my hands, not in an attempt to render the cockroach dizzy and nauseous, but to check whether other roaches also happened to be living rent-free in my primary source of breakfast starch. Much to my dismay, I spotted two more. Since it seemed too early in the day to feel disgusted, I simply tossed the bread in the freezer, and hoped the insectoid freeloaders would find the sudden climate change unbearable, and conveniently die.

Now I know what you’re going to ask me: Phil X, could there have been a cockroach living in your peanut butter and sliced banana sandwich? Well, there’s every chance a fourth roach had wandered onto either of the two slices that went into my sandwich. However, I do like my peanut butter on toast, so I browned my bread thoroughly, to give it that extra dry texture.

So I really don’t know if I inadvertently digested a side order of toasted roach with my breakfast. But if I did, doesn’t that mean I got extra protein, which is good for me, anyway?

THE CAT ON THE HAT

I was walking home through Allston after work, and I passed by this interesting-looking boutique near the corner of Harvard Avenue and Gardner Street. “Maybe I can find something for K.,” I said to myself, feeling all festive-like and Christmas-ey, albeit dirt poor-ish.

I quietly browsed for about fifteen minutes, when something atop a display case caught my eye. As I examined it, a cat, which apparently had been lurking in the shadows all the while, crept over and started purring and rubbing itself against my legs.

“Hey there, little friend,” I said. The cat took this for an invitiation, and leaped atop the glass case. It had black fur, with yellow eyes in their midst, which kind of hynotize a person the way a star does when it’s viewed through a telescope, if it sits alone amidst a sea of tranquil darkness. I will admit, the cat was pretty cute.

The proprietress of the boutique said the cat’s name was “Aura.” I gave Aura plenty of attention, but then settled back into the particular item which drew my curiosity in the first place. Sensing that she had become second banana, Aura treated my ungloved hands like toys, thwacking them with her paws and cheeks, before settling into a curiosity of her own choosing: My ski cap-adorned noggin.

Basically, the cat, very quickly and stealthily, put her two front paws on my shoulder, then jumped on top of my head. Why she decided to do this, I cannot say. Perhaps she looked at my black ski cap, and the swirls of equally-obsidian hair that peeked out from underneath, and saw something she felt simpatico with. Or maybe she wanted to eat me. All I know is, before I had a chance to recoil from her sudden physical contact, Aura managed to balance herself atop my head. She dug her claws like tent poles into my winter coat, but I could feel her rapidly settling onto her new nap cushion, the brunt of her weight pressing down on my neck, her fuzzy tail tickling my ear.

“Oh! Oh, no,” the proprietress started to say, followed by about a half-minute of, “Aura! Aura, you stop that!” I might have also started shouting at the cat on my head, but the whole thing happened so fast that I was really quite stunned. I can only imagine the look on my face; wait a second, I saw the look on my face, through one of those little round mirrors on the nearby display case. I looked like some kind of comic-relief witch doctor—not necessarily a good look for me. But oh, the cat’s furry little arms pressing against my face felt so nice and soft, and her body warmed the top of my head like a hot water bottle.

And she purred—a hushed, incessant purring, the way car engines rev up in an environmentalist’s wet dream. Even though I looked fairly ridiculous, and Aura was probably more weight than I should have had perched on my head, I decided to let the cat have her fun. It was the holiday season, after all.

“You don’t have a problem with her doing that, do you?” the proprietress asked. I envisioned her swatting at Aura with a broom, and clobbering me on the melon instead.

“Oh, I guess not,” I said, and asked to see more of the boutique’s wares. She invited me to the opposite end of the store, which took me a while to get to, since I still had a cat on my head.

I won’t say whether I bought anything from that boutique—it’s only a week and some change until Christmas, and it’s totally incidental to the story. But I will say that, on the way out, the proprietress told me to crouch next to a jewelry case, guessing that the cat might take its leave of me there. She guessed right; Aura disembarked near the doorway, and scampered off from whence she came. But before leaving, I called after her, and mentioned that although I had fun, I had clearly been an off-duty cab. “Next time, keep an eye out for whether the light on top is on,” I said.