Is Catching a Cat like Catching a Literary Agent?

I had to take my cat, Penny, to the vet for a vaccine. Such a simple task you might think. If it were a dog, I could pull out the leash and head for the door and the dog would probably beat me to the car. But not so with cats.

            We started out the morning with our normal routine ~ some breakfast, some scritches and a brief human to feline chat. Then I brought out the cat carrier.

            You’d have thought I’d brought in a weapon of mass destruction. Knowing what I might be in for, I had closed off all the doors and positioned my husband and daughter in strategic places to curtail Penny’s attempts at escape.

            Head and tail down, Penny started to trot through the living room and into the kitchen while her brother, Lenny, sensing danger, yowled in protest. She rounded the corner, skittered through the family room and bolted into the entry way, which brought her back to the living room. Seeing me behind her, she ran up the stairs, saw my husband, and bolted back down past me. She stopped in the dining room, watched me approach, backtracked, jumped on the piano and up onto the stairwell landing. That brought her into view of my husband so she turned around again, sailed down the stairs and dodged between two couches in the family room. I followed her, talking softly, telling her there was nowhere to go. Twice I caught her and just as I put her in the carrier, she twisted out of my grip and bound away.

Around and around we went. For an hour. Penny would go one way, I’d head her off; she go the other way, I’d meet her on the other side.

My daughter stated that she was starting to get a leg cramp and my husband was now reading his phone. Finally, as Penny began to tire, my daughter suggested she tip the cat carrier upward to a steep angle. If I could just grab Penny one more time, we could let gravity pull her to the back of the carrier while I slammed the door shut.

It worked. Not without some scuffling and expletives, but finally she was in there and I was able to get her into the car.

As we sat at the vet’s, waiting our turn to be seen, I looked at my bruised knuckles that had scraped along one of our walls and the scratches on my arms that had been used as traction pads. I felt like I had been through this before. But where? And then it hit me: the exhaustion, the waiting, the repetitive path I took to achieve my objective, reminded me of my efforts when querying literary agents to represent my book. Except I was never quite successful, which tells me that catching a cat is actually easier than catching a literary agent.