Hey, Les, it wasn't that kind of a one-way ride.
We were living on a small fruit farm at the time, and got the cat for the kids. I had no train layout there, so the cat wasn't going to be a problem. However, the bigger she got, the wilder she got. One day the kids were playing in the bedroom upstairs, thumping and bumping about. I think that my wife and I were out on the porch having a coffee. The next thing we knew, there was a terrible crash, and when we ran into the house, the chandelier was on the dining room table. Turns out that the cat had been sitting on the table, watching the crystals of the light fixture sparkling in the sun as the kids thumped about. Finally, the temptation was too much, and she leapt up at the light. Her weight ripped it from the ceiling.
That got her banned to the enclosed back porch. She continued to get nastier and nastier. I walked by the window facing the driveway one day, and she leapt at the window, which was open. Luckily, there was an aluminum screen installed, but she fastened her claws into it trying to get at me. She looked like a moth plastered on the radiator of a car, spread-eagled and hissing. We didn't have a barn to keep her in (we had no cooler, so the produce went directly to market or the canners), so my wife asked her uncle, who ran a dairy farm, if he needed another barn cat. "Sure", he said, "I'll be visiting your Dad (who lived not too far from us) on Sunday, bring the cat over there and I'll take her home with me."
Well, just subduing the cat was a job. I finally got her by throwing an old army greatcoat over her, then, with some difficulty, got her into a very heavy-duty cardboard box. Wearing leather gloves, I finally got the box closed, and wrapped it with some tape and a couple pieces of rope. There were so many paws poking through the gap in the lid (of course, they were festooned with claws) that an observer would have thought that there were at least a half-dozen cats contained within.
When we arrived at my in-laws' place, the uncle gave me the keys to his car and said, "Just put the box in the trunk".
He later related what transpired when he got home. Evidently, the cat had managed to get out of the box at some point during the drive home. When the uncle opened the trunk, that cat came out like a Minuteman missile leaving its silo. They never saw it again. :-D
Wayne
wall1
