I discovered a box of books I’d brought home from my mother’s house has since been peed in by one of our cats. The pee dried. Cat pee is frightfully pungent. It’s not going to be pleasant reading a book impregnated with cat urine.
Some books I threw away:
Lloyd Alexander’s Taran Wanderer books.
A book of poetry by Jonathan London, a Sonoma County poet now best known for his children’s book Froggy Gets Dressed and its sequels.
Some Poems Heaped Up by another SoCo poet Jim McCrary.
An edition of Gulliver’s Travels I bought in England during my semester in London. I think we were in Cambridge and there was a church with a box of books on its porch. A sign above a slot in the wall asked 10p per book. It was a nice hardcover not ill-used and had a color plate in the front of giant Gulliver up to his waist in the sea pulling a fleet of ships.
A little collection of Federico Garcia Lorca’s folk song poems. Nice wood cuts of dancing crickets and such.
One of two copies of the one book by Helen Luster that I own.
A kid’s book about a boy who is banished by his caveman tribe and threatened by various prehistoric (and pre-human-era) beasts. When young I was fascinated not only by the great dinosaurs and such but by the boy’s almost-nudity (a furry black loincloth clung to him throughout his adventures) and by the enticingly cruel way the tribe tied him to a log (a sacrifice?) and threw the log into the river. I’d saved it up to now mostly to provide fodder for a blog entry. This paragraph will have to do.
All my Xanth books by Piers Anthony. Xanth is a somewhat Oz-like fantasy world in which magic is taken for granted. The pages abound with puns.
If I really miss them I can hunt these up again somewhere, I figure. Except for the poetry books. I did hold onto two books by Paul Mariah. I’m thinking about putting them in a plastic bag with potpourri or something. I don’t think a masking scent will make the cat urine stink undetectable or even non-noxious, but it may make it more weird than hideous. Who knows?
6 comments:
Didn't the caveman book have some sort of origami dinosaurs in the back of it? I liked that book. For the dinosaurs of course. It was a tiny little 60s caveman movie. And so much shorter (and therefore with less spots) than a 60s caveman movie.
Yup. Origami dinosaurs. Which we never cut out to fold up.
If the cat hadn't peed on it I might've even tried the craft project.
Of course we never cut them out! That would have damaged the book! Something that I don't worry about so much these days.
Awww my friend.. if the cat peed on it, throw it out! Unless you can figure out someway to get the smell off the books ;)
Hi Jonah, nice to see your tipped to left head. I'm saving the Paul Mariah books because I don't think they'd be easy to replace & Paul was sorta my mentor for a couple years. Otherwise, yeah, stinkypee books are no good.
I guess I don't mind the plug for the cat pee solution promoters, though it teases the solution and demands you buy the book in order to learn it. I'll throw in a link to my own post about a cat pee deodorizing formula that is cheap and easy to make at home and really works wonders: https://lovesettlement.blogspot.com/2005/11/cat-pee.html
I'll just have to say that we learned why one of our two cat brothers was so assiduously spraying through all the years we had him -- all the years, that is, except the last six months of his life, those six months being the months he lived longer than his brother. In other words, the main motivation for spraying was to hassle his brother.
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