Category: Uncategorized

A couple months ago, Heather, Erika, and I went to the TROSA furniture store on Foster Street in Durham.  It was complete bedlam because the Duke students had just gotten back, and they were clamoring to find cheap furniture with which to outfit their dorm rooms and frat houses.  Everything that was remotely nice or hip or functional already had a ‘sold’ sign on it.  I was about to give up on the furniture and just see how many hipsters I could elbow on the way out, but my friends and I made a pass through the upstairs room first.  And I found an awesome chair.  An old-ass, yellowy green easy chair, in surprisingly good shape, that squeaked when you rocked it.  Perfect for my old-ass house.  Best of all, forty bucks!  Except it was half-off.  Twenty bucks!

I brought it home, and Maxwell took immediately to the seat back, especially when the late-afternoon sun slanted in.  Redford loved the chair itself.  When he was boisterous, it gave him pretty easy access to Maxwell.  When he was tuckered out, he’d curl up in it, his head flopped over the arm.

Now, here’s the thing about Redford:  he shreds.  And not the good kind of shredding.  No lightning-fast guitar riffs.  No adept cutbacks on a surfboard.  Not even destroying documents with which someone might ruin my credit.  I mean savagely ripping apart perfectly good towels, blankets, and pillows.  It’s kind of cute, actually.  You can practically see him thinking, “I’ll get you, varmint!”  And he’ll snatch the item up in his teeth and whip his head back and forth, deftly breaking its neck, before stopping, dizzy, and staggering into my CD rack.

Well, Redford had tried a couple of times to kill the cushion of the green chair, but I always managed to wrest it from his fierce jaws before he did any serious damage.  That’s why, when I came home from work the other day, I didn’t really understand what I was seeing.  The chair’s cushion was destroyed…and Redford was locked safely away in his kennel.  At first, I thought Violet had done it.

Now, here’s the thing about Violet:  she shreds, but only old magazines, completed crosswords, and tags that have been pulled off new items of clothing.  And she doesn’t even do that very often.  Mostly, she just collects my footwear and snuggles with it on the couch or in my bed.

But there was no denying, the green chair’s cushion had been maimed—the upholstery ripped completely off, bits of fabric and foam littering the living room floor.  That’s when I noticed that all the foam bits lay around Redford’s kennel, the upholstery was inside Redford’s kennel.

That little bastard had stuck his little bastard-paw or little bastard-snout through the wire of the cage and somehow ripped my chair’s cushion to bits.

Either that, or Violet is up to some very tricky shit.