Three Cats and a Roast

I swear that the following testimony is true!

Many, many years ago I was living in a small cinder block house on what were then the western outskirts of Bloomington, Indiana. I had three large house cats, Damao, a large, dark grey, tiger-striped cat; Heizi, a black cat with white boots (sweetest cat in the world); and Xiaomao, a tri-color female with six toes on each of her front paws.

I was having company for dinner and was defrosting a Boston pork roast into which I was going to insert pieces of garlic, then roll it in salt and pepper, roast, and serve with scalloped apples, etc.

I had to run out to the store and was behind on defrosting the roast. I decided to set it on a plate in the sink and to invert a mixing bowl over it to keep the cats from getting at it. Just before I went out the door, I was overcome with a wave of caution and filled another, slightly smaller, mixing bowl most of the way with water and set it on top of the inverted bowl to insure its protection from the cats.

When I got back from the store about 45 minutes later (I'm a sucker for grocery stores), I found a partially chewed, semi-defrosted pork roast on my kitchen floor. Amazed, I went to the sink to try to ascertain where I had gone wrong. In the sink was the plate with an inverted mixing bowl on it and with a bowl of water on top of that.

'Tis a puzzlement, a mystery, a pork enigma wrapped in dander which I've never been able to fathom, but I have an image in my mind of two cats holding up some bowls while a third wrestles a pork roast to the ground for all to share.