This column first appeared in the Jan. 18, 2007, Glasgow Daily Times. It is back by, ahem, popular demand. Many people still ask how the “Magic Cat” is and I reply, “Still escaping.”

I have a magic cat. She’s not a heroic kitty like Shrek’s Puss in Boots, she’s more like the Cheshire Cat of Alice in Wonderland, able to magically disappear from our basement and reappear in a bedroom upstairs, or a laundry basket filled with freshly dried towels.

A little background on our magic kitty named Polly — short for Jackson Pollack, the abstract expressionist painter who was known for the randomness of his work whereby he would pour or splash paint onto a surface. Polly has splashes of brown and tan randomly dumped on a white, puffy surface. Truman Capote probably would’ve said of Pollack’s work, “That’s not painting, that’s spilling.”

Of the cat, Capote would say, “That’s not a cat, it’s a burglar.”

Polly is lucky to be with us. She was found one night, a ball of fuzz, on the tire of a car parked at Barren County High School. She was literally the size of a large dust bunny and fit in the palm of my hand. I had just finished covering a district volleyball tournament when I met her outside in the cold. We had an animal menagerie at our house already — two dogs, two cats and two fish — when I climbed into my car with Polly — her name was kitten then — and poured down the road toward home. My mind was not actually made that we would keep her until I jostled the car to a stop in my drive.

I left the door open, jogged inside the house and told the kids and wife, who loves all animals good and bad, that there was a surprise outside. Meanwhile, outside, the dogs circled the car like sharks. I had not considered the puff ball might be big enough to exit the vehicle stage left. Getting out of things, we would later learn, is one of the cat’s better tricks.

Once I got back outside, I searched through the car and could not find the cat. Of course, the family was standing on the porch wanting to know what the heck I had in the car that was making the dogs go crazy.

Then the cacophony of eeks and ruffs kicked up. The dogs, neither of which big enough to threaten a soul, had the puff ball on it’s back with four claws skyward. In a brief moment of brilliance, I grabbed the kitten, trying to save it. The magic cat bit a hole into my pinky finger. I dropped the little bugger, grabbed it again and this time it did not bite.

We should’ve known then that this cat was going to be trouble.

There’s the background. Here’s the magical part. Polly can escape from anything.

We try to keep our menagerie in the basement — we now have four cats and two dogs — but Polly doesn’t like to stay in the basement. One day while we sat peacefully eating dinner upstairs, we heard a rustle at the basement door. Then the door popped open and we, since all four human family members sat at the table, were a bit surprised. Out from behind the swinging door came a meowing Polly.

Her escape wasn’t an accident. She’s done it numerous times since so that we must now lock the basement door, and any other door, we don’t want her to open.

These days when the magic cat breaks out of her version of Alcatraz, out flows the menagerie, scuttling over the wood floor. Meow. Ruff. Argh.

James Brown is editor of the Daily Times and lives in a house with animal lovers. He can be reached by e-mail at jbrown@glasgowdailytimes.com