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One of the perks of being a cat is that you get to spend so much time with members of the human species. We all know that humans are weird, but they’re also weirdly entertaining. In fact I can spend hours watching humans being, well, human. And it was exactly such an opportunity we were having now, watching Tex Poole, our human’s dad, engaged in an activity he called ‘clearing the attic.’

You have to understand that part of the human experience is to collect junk. Piles and piles of junk. And then at some point, usually in the spring, they suddenly get tired of this pile of junk and start moving it from one place to another. In this case Tex was moving the pile from his attic to the sidewalk, where he hoped other humans would take it away and add it to their own little pile.

It’s one of those human pastimes that’s simply fascinating for a people watcher like myself, and so I was having a great time watching this particular human now.

“Why is Tex putting all this junk on the sidewalk, Max?” asked Dooley, who marveled at the sheer volume of stuff the Pooles had amassed in such a small space.

“He hopes other humans will take it away,” I said.

“But why did he collect it in the first place?”

“Now that,” I said, “is a mystery I still haven’t figured out.”

I may be an amateur detective, but there are mysteries that are simply too deep to fathom.

Tex had donned an old pair of jeans, an old sweater, and had put a baseball cap on top of his head, as he rooted through the stuff collected in his attic, and it really was a sight to behold, as he opened a box, and either uttered cries of ecstasy, or agony. Ecstasy when he found an old train set he’d played with as a boy, agony when he came upon one of Gran’s treasures. Such as there are: ‘priceless’ artifacts she’d picked up at some garage sale in the year of our Lord 1977. Or the oddly shaped—or oddly misshaped, depending on the eye of the beholder—clay pots that were the product of a pottery class she took in the early eighties.

“Will you look at that?” Tex muttered when he opened yet another old box and took out a tattered little booklet. “I used to read these all the time!”

A glance told me it was a booklet in a series featuring the Hardy Boys.

“Who are the Hardy Boys, Max?” asked Dooley, not missing a beat. “Are they boys that are very hardy?”

“I suppose so,” I said. Of course they’d have to be hardy to survive up there in the attic for all these years. At least the attic was dry, but it was also dusty, and not a lot of fun to hang around in for long periods of time.

And so when Tex settled down to read his copy of these hardy Hardy Boys, we decided to take a break from watching him, and go and do the other thing that we enjoy so much: take long naps on any surface we find agreeable. Today I decided to check out the new comforter Chase had brought home with him, and had been extolling the virtues of when he and Odelia put it on the bed that morning.

And as we settled down, I remembered how Chase had said, a catch in his voice, that this would be the first time he and his lady love would get to have first dibs at this nice new thing they got.

How cute humans are. And how naive.

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While Tex was thus engrossed in the adventures of Frank and Joe Hardy, as chronicled by Franklin W. Dixon, keen eyes had spotted the growing pile of attic surplus on the sidewalk. It just so happened that a troop of girl scouts had selected this particular day to traipse up and down the neighborhood to spread some sweetness and light in the form of girl scout cookies, and so when they turned up on the doorstep of 46 Harrington Street, hoping to extract some coin from the Poole family, their attention was momentarily distracted by the remnants of Tex and Marge Poole’s past. So much so that one of their lot, a smallish freckled specimen answering to the name Mabel, felt compelled to pick up a shoebox and take a look inside.

It is, after all, not just cats that marvel at the strange things humans do. Little boys and girls—hardy or not hardy—are just the same. And when Mabel found a stack of letters inside this box, neatly tied together with a red ribbon and a bow, she gibbered excitedly, “You guys, look what I found!”

The other girls of her troop all trooped around, putting their cookie-dispensing mission on hold for the nonce, and gibbered just as excitedly as Mabel extricated the bundle of letters from its receptacle, and gently relieved it from its red ribbon.

“The mailman must have dropped them,” said Mabel, holding the letters reverently. Her daddy was a mailman, and she loved her daddy very much, and had a fervent reverence for the mysterious profession he was engaged in. Handing out presents in the form of letters every day just seemed like such a nice thing to do!

“We have to help the mailman,” said a precocious girl with braces named Jackie.