19 July 2019
“Olivia, Don’t touch it. It’ll scratch!” the father who had walked ahead of his daughter warned from a short distance.
The daughter was about 8 or 9 years old. Dressed in school PE gear and holding a water bottle, she looked lovingly at her object of affection, a plump one-eyed community cat lounging on a stone ledge in Holland Village.
The father tried to look stern as his daughter looked pleadingly at him for permission to touch the portly feline.
“I said no, means no!” The father raised his voice a bit as his child‘s palm lingered stubbornly over the sleeping cat, who seemed oblivious to the parent-child drama he had caused just by being spotted.
The father then took out his cell phone and told his daughter to look in his direction. He snapped a few shots of his precious little girl hovering over the white & grey cat.
But the daughter was not satisfied with just having pictures of her standing with a cat. Her childlike heart burst with an edenic yearning to make contact with the animal. So her hand hovered within biting range over the cat’s head as she stood her ground and continued to smile at her daddy.
Suddenly, the cat flopped on his back and wriggled a little, exposing his fluffy white belly to the sky.
Joyful giggles erupted at the furry display of flexibility. The girl then brought her fingers down to brush the cat’s head lightly, not once, but twice!
“Daddy, I touched the cat!” Olivia’s voice exploded with triumphant glee, as her father tried very hard not to smile back.
Lisa Ong 