A Cat-Scratched Hero

From a bridge near Dad’s Mississippi Delta farm, my three daughters used BB guns to improve their marksmanship. Standing on the bridge’s downstream side, they stood, locked and loaded, waiting to shoot balloons attached to small weights that I tossed from the bridge’s upstream side. As the targets floated beneath them, the balloon killers fired away, making chalk marks on the railing for each hit. Sodas and snacks at a nearby country store were their reward for bursting nine out of ten. Once, when the canal flowed swiftly following heavy January rains, I heard no shots after dropping the balloons. The girls had spotted a shivering kitten clinging to a bridge piling, and their anguished cries said it all: You, Dad, are a man and must do what any man worth his salt would do: save that poor, suffering, shivering little kitty.

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