Today marked the day of a wonderful event in my life. It was the day of the vindication of the cats.

It started out as any other day, with one small exception. I have recently been fighting a series of ear infections, which my mother was quite fond of blaming on the cats. No matter that I had been plagued with this malady from birth, she was quite certain it was due solely to my numerous rescued cats. In fact, my mother believes that cats cause all illnesses, including, but not limited too, slipped disks, headaches, toe- aches, and stomachaches, arthritis, cancer, tuberculosis, and a host of other maladies. This morning I was scheduled to go back to the ear specialist for what he referred too as an "evaluation". This "evaluation" would determine whether I would be required to have emergency surgery for the ear infection that had moved into the jawbone, causing something known as Mastoiditis. I spent my morning gathering up my feline friends, prepping them for the inevitable accusation that their grandmother would lay upon their paws: That they, alone, were responsible for their mother’s illness, and most likely every other international and national incident that had occurred during the past 10 years, including war, magicians being attacked by lions (which she is certain was caused by my cats gathering in a storage facility, hopping a plane to Vegas, and whispering into the tiger’s ear that "…now is the time to begin the uprising…"), and then proceeding to Korea where she is certain they taught the Korean government how to step up the manufacturing of nuclear bombs in the event there were not enough tigers to follow through with their initial plan to take over the world.

The cats were obviously upset by this recent turn of events, and immediately dispersing, opted unanimously to locate a cure for me, so they could redeem themselves in the eyes of their grandmother.

I awoke the next morning to a ringing phone and to what I fondly refer to as the, "If You Didn’t Have All Those Animals..." speech from my well-meaning mother, the theme of which centered on cats being the "driving force behind the decline of Western Civilization". She rambled on as I held the telephone to my ear, telling me that my animals were the sole cause of this ear infection, and that if I don’t get them all out of my home, I’m shortening my life span by at least 50 years.

I proceeded to inform her, as I’ve informed her a thousand times before, that getting rid of my beloved pets is not, never has been, and never will be, an option in my life.

She then asked me, "What if the doctor told you that you were going to die in a month if you didn’t get rid of your cats, but if you did get rid of them, you could live to be 100?"

First of all, what kind of a sick hypothetical situation is that? And secondly, what are the odds of me actually living to be a hundred years old? And thirdly, why do people think that I would want to live to be 100 years old, if I didn’t have animals in my life? I’ll take the shorter life span, thank you very much.