smelly cat

Buying ice-cream from the ice-cream truck is like feeding a stray cat.  They keep coming back.  It really isn't an ice-cream truck. It's an old van with stickers all over it and a set of speakers rigged to the top that plays a carousel-like song.  How can anyone want to buy something to eat from something that looks so dirty?  

In the three years we've lived in this house, that van has been driving down our street from time to time but I've never allowed my kids (despite #1's begging) to buy whatever it is he's selling.  All that changed a couple weeks ago, when Spouse was home one afternoon looking after the kids. When I got home the first thing #1 tells me is, "Daddy let us buy ice cream from the ice cream truck!"  

When I was 12 my brother and I fed a stray cat, contrary to my mother's wishes.  The cat kept coming back, so we kept filling his bowl with milk.  A few weeks later we discovered it wasn't a he, but a she. Not just a she, but a she with 12 kittens that needed to be fed!  We could no longer hide our deviance from my mother, who ordered us to close down the cat soup kitchen.  But the darn cats wouldn't go away. They hung around and hung around.  Their patience ran out and then the meowing and whining started. For days we could hear them outside our door, begging for food. It was pitiful but my brother and I had learned our lesson.  Animal control came and set up a humane trap and in 24 hours the cats were gone.  

Well, that darn ice cream truck keeps hanging around and hanging around.  It drives past our house every day, multiple times.  And today it parked itself right next to our house and just sat there, with the music churning for 10 minutes.  It's almost like he's trying to smoke us out of the house; to buy his ice cream just to get him to leave.  But his persistence is making me even more certain that we will never feed that stray cat again.  Too bad there is no ice-cream truck control to remove this unwanted pest.