Vaughn (my late wife and partner) used to tell this true story on us. So, in her memory....

We once lived on a rural, two-lane road at an old farmstead - house on one side of the road, barns on the other. Our little Siamese loved to cross the road to explore the barns, do the predator thing and snooze. Next-to-no-traffic, so it was pretty safe.

One sunny, summer morning while the cat was thus employed in the barn, the county repaved the road!

The cat's solution to the newly tarred, still-hot rd. was to tear across it, heading for home at top speed.

There are no mudflaps on a cat.

It was our first (and only) experience of what tarring-and-feathering must have been like.

The vet did not (for some reason) urge us to bring the tarred cat into his clinic. Instead, he advised us to soften the tar that liberally coated our poor dear with vegetable oil...which did spread it nicely. We oiled, wiped, oiled again and wiped again until our formerly lilac-point siamese was a blue-eyed, pathetic creature of a sickly yellow color slowly turning rancid in the late afternoon sun. We were of about the same color, odor and disposition.

A visiting friend suggested that cornstarch would absorb the remaining oil and tar. Without too much thought (which we were long past anyway), she and Vaughn literally dumped an entire box of cornstarch on the exhausted, dozing animal.

It did work, eventually, after many more hours of combing and brushing.

The cat, bless her, survived to have many more adventures. She was about seven years old then. She lived to be twenty.

Best of all, she never again (to my knowledge) crossed a road.

- George