Does The Cat Want Her Medicine?

You knew a cat once, your family had known the woman who owned her, she wasn't a relative, but you visited her enough that she was familiar, wow, she had one sick cat. That woman would say, "Does pretty want her medicine?" & you thought, the stupid cat doesn't want any medicine. It doesn't know any better. But then the cat would actually look better after she got the medicine, & you'd have to wonder, did she know she felt better because of the medicine, did she understand the cause & effect? Some animals did - that's how you could train them.

You were at that impressionable age when you thought every example was the perfect example, when you thought the types you met were the only types that existed. You'd hear snatches of conversation that made absolutely no sense so you'd twist them around in your head until they made your kind of sense. Like that man who made the comment about "the next door over, past the railroad tracks." You got it into your head that a town's limits were circumscribed by railroad tracks. You finally got brave enough to tell your observation another kid & he said scornfully, "What did they use before railroads? Moats?"

You wanted things to go on forever. You got sad when, looking at a map, you saw roads ending, dead-ending or worse, changing names inexplicably. Maybe that's why the cat freaked you out. You kind of thought it would be sick forever, & if it weren't aware of the way the medicine helped it, it would be afraid of the medicine all the time, day after day. That sounded like some kind of torture. But, you know, it couldn't be torture if the cat were feeling better.

You never asked if medicine sometimes didn't work, or its effects wore off. You learned that, maybe, on some television medical drama years later.