“That settles it. The cat loves you more than she loves me!”

Those were the words I heard two weeks ago. This was just after I broke my collarbone. We had noticed that Allie wasn’t quite herself. And she was losing her hair. We looked up the reasons cats lose their hair. It could be dietary or a disease or stress. We haven’t changed her diet. And she seemed healthy enough in every other respect — just as wacky as ever. And there’s no more stress-free environment for a cat, I think, than our home.

Nevertheless, out of concern The Yankee took her cat to the vet. They performed all the vet tests. I’m sure they spelled out some things so the c-a-t wouldn’t catch o-n. (She’s a smart cat, we tell ourselves, in jest. We know how smart she is and isn’t.)

But when she came home she put the cat carrier on the ground and opened it up to return Allie to her normal environment. She recounted the conversation with the vet.

She looks small, but she’s incredibly active and kitten-like for a cat of her age. She doesn’t have any symptom of disease or illness. So maybe it is stress, the vet says. “Have you gotten new furniture? A new pet? A new kid? A new car?”

No, no, no, no … and how does a new car figure into that? What cat patient of yours told you that?

The only thing that is different, my darling wife told the vet, is that I broke my collarbone. I was in an immobilizer and sitting in the arm chair. Her chair. (It was about the only place I could get comfortable for two weeks.) The problem, as far as we could tell, is that Allie wasn’t spending her regular amount of time on me. She has an afternoon nap in my lap and there’s a part of the evening where she comes to visit me. Also every time someone stands up she acts like a toddler. “Hold me, hold me.” I didn’t do a lot of that for several days.

That’s it, the vet said. Everything else is the same. She can’t get in his lap and he’s forced her out of her chair. Only you can’t do anything about that for a while.

So she came home and said that. “The cat loves you more than she loves me! Whenever I’ve gotten ill you’ve never had to take her to the vet because she was stressed out about it.”

The next week, the very day I removed the immobilizer she was all over me again. She’d stayed away on her own prior to that.

Earlier this week I moved from the chair over to the sofa. I can sit comfortably there again. (Small victories.)

Allie?

Everything is back to normal in her world.

I would make some allusion to July rolling out and August wet-heaving its way in. But this is summer in the Deep South. You don’t even really notice it anymore after a time. The movement, I mean. You notice the heat. Can’t get away from the heat sometimes. And the heat tends to minimize your movement unless you’re in the mood for it. But June turns into July and the mercury really takes a big jump. August, as a season, never feels much different from July.

You don’t notice a change until late September. And usually that is more of a left brain “Good grief it is almost October, enough with the heat already!”

There is no out like a baker’s oven, in like a sauna comparison for today, though. Everything is just hot. To spice things up you’ll sometimes get distance thunder. We had that today, and more due in the overnight. To really spice things up you might be in the right spot every now and then to get thunder really close by. I woke up to the that earlier this week. Lightning strikes were very close, according to the old lifeguard counting trick. The thunder wasn’t loud, but Lord how it rolled. I counted three different strikes where I could hear the energy moving away for 30 seconds or more.

Rode my bike in the trainer this evening. Got an hour in. Felt really good, until it didn’t. It is amazing how much fitness you can lose in three weeks. But that is a problem of my lungs. My arm is fine. I turned the pedals standing out of the saddle, too, reducing my points of contact to four. Felt great.

So that’s right on schedule. My doctor said two to three weeks for the stationary, and next Monday is three weeks. He told me it will be four or five weeks before I can ride again on the road. I might err on the long side of that estimate though, just to be sure.

This is what I don’t understand: Professional cyclist Fabian Cancellara broke his collarbone at the beginning of April. He fell in a race in a bad way. He had a quadruple fracture. I’ve seen the X-ray, it was bad. And yet, just two months later, he won the prologue of the Tour de France and held the lead for days. I’m not making a comparison, because that’s just foolish. Cancellara is a terrific cyclist and a hard man, but how did he do that?

I’ll just console myself that he spent more time lying on the ground than I did. And I walked off. Of course, he had a bevy of doctors telling him to wait for the ambulance. You don’t get a premiere athlete up and walk him around after a spill like his. YouTube it if you like — Cancellara + Flanders 2012 should do it — I’m not interested in watching bike crashes all day.

Out for dinner tonight. Visitors were passing through town and had a craving for Niffers. That’s what people always want when they come back to town. Even, we learned tonight, the politicians. (We know politicians.) Good thing we like the place. (They now have cheesecake, the sign said.)

And that’s really the day. I rested, I read, I rode, I stretched my shoulder, I ate. It was delightful in almost every way, but I would like to be moving just a little bit more. Every day a little bit more, right?