“The Flying Kitten”

This hilarious story was reported on June 1, 1987, in “Bob Levey’s Washington,” a column that appears in the Washington Post . (The same column a year earlier contained the automobile legend “The Arrest,” as I mentioned in Chapter 2.) Two readers who sent clippings of Levey’s column to me indicated that they had also heard the story repeated orally. I paraphrase:

A couple found a cute stray kitten and decided to keep it as a pet. One day, though, it climbed to the top branch of a birch tree in their backyard and refused to come down. After lots of fruitless coaxing, the couple looped a rope over the branch, hoping to pull the branch low enough for them to reach the stranded pet. But as they pulled, the rope broke and the kitten was launched into orbit. They were unable to find it.

A week later, while grocery shopping, they met one of their neighbors in the checkout line. The neighbor was carrying a bag of cat food.

“We didn’t know you had a cat,” one of them commented.

“I didn’t until last week,” the neighbor replied. “But Joe and I were sitting out on the patio the other day when this kitten dropped out of the sky, just like that. Fell right into Joe’s lap.”

Even though none of the thousands (?) of readers of my newspaper column about “The Flying Kitten” during the week of February 22, 1988, responded to my request for further versions of the story, I still feel sure that it must be a legend. Why? First, because Bob Levey quoted it from a woman who heard it from her Washington hairdresser. And, second, because stories about cats stuck in trees are usually apocryphal. (See the next legend.)