From the Top by Michael Perry

younger daughter. Last winter it was strep. She brought it home from preschool. Gave it to her sister. Then her mom. Finally, me. And naturally, by the time I got it, she was all better. So there we were, the grownups, slumping and hacking and lump-throating around trying to get the kids off to bed, and there’s the one who started it all, now healthy and happy as you please andhippety-skipping around the house yodeling joy-joy songs at the top of her lungs, and I thought, “Why, you … you …”
    Oh, but you are so happy to see them well again. Iowa singer-songwriter Greg Brown has a song called “Say a Little Prayer,” and if you’ve ever walked the floor with a fevered child in your arms, just yearning for that child to be well again, you will understand that whatever else Greg Brown might have been or be, he knows what it is to be a worried dad in the dark hours.
    This latest affliction is blessedly free of fever or anything more serious than a chest-wracking cough and stuffy head and itchy ears, but I will say that at this moment my eyeballs feel as if they have been rolled in sand and someone has overinflated my brain. Naturally, as I cradle my box of Kleenex and wonder when I’ll recover the ability to taste anything milder than Triple-X horseradish sauce, the little one who started all this is well on the road to hale and hearty and wondering why Dad is dragging. Last night when I put her to bed we read two books, and then I told her a funny story using my comical stuffy-nose voice, and then I placed my hand on her fever-free brow and leaned down and gave her a kiss and whispered in her ear, “I love you, little Typhoid Mary …”
THAT CAT
    Back home on the farm I have been contemplating my status in the realm. The trigger for this introspection is a black cat, probably even now this very dang second lying snoozily belly up in the recliner by the window, deep in the dreams of the mice he’s not catching, or the frankly fishy treats I’m financing in order to supplement any nutrients he might have missed in the process of being professionally languorous. Cats are the grand mavens of languor. At least when a dog dreams about hunting, its feet twitch. This reflects a certain goofball dedication to the cause, even if it is only in doggie dreamworld. The only cause that cat is dedicated to is: that cat.
    That cat first appeared in my life riding a wave of blue-eyed beseechment, which is to say the first time I saw him he was framed in my elder daughter’s arms, as she and her sister looked up at me with the sort of sad cotton-candy gaze normally reserved for cheap velvet paintings and suspect charity infomercials.
    I held the line for upwards of twenty seconds. Then I said yes, trying my best to sound grumpy. There were ground rules, of course, regarding the feeding and the watering and the outer limits of kitty’s health insurance.
    Above all—and I believe I even raised one finger and said, “Above all”—I stated in unequivocal terms that we live on a farm, and this would be a barn cat, and barn cats do not live in the house because then we would call them house cats.
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    I have to push “pause” here for a moment. I am fully aware that there is nothing more dangerous to one’s career than speaking in public on the subject of cats. You can call the president an alien communard, imply that the Statue of Liberty is a man, and recommend that NASCAR go all-electric and race clockwise and you’ll collect a few uppity emails and half-star reviews, but say the wrong thing about a cat and you’ll find out exactly what it feels like to be chewed up and spit out as a human hairball. So I am proceeding advisedly here. Save your letters; I am a farmboy slow to progress but progressing nonetheless. If you find me a philistine on the feline front, feel free to punish me by sending five swear-dollars to your local humane