When I was a boy, growing up in Missouri, there were people who would say that a particularly challenging task was, "like herding cats." The simile does not have to be explained.

So, as the Mideast explodes in flames, as Ebola feverishly stumbles toward my door, even as Texas school children are taught that Jesus was the first president, even as Kim Kardashian inexplicably makes her tawdry, stupid way into the newspapers, I'm teaching a cat to nap.

One would expect teaching a cat to nap would be much easier than herding cats. In fact, it strains the imagination that any cat would require sleeping lessons, sleeping being the signature skill of all cats.

Backstory. We had an old cat, a very gentle fellow who loved to sleep on me. On days off, particularly in the cold weather, I would return to our home after eating $7 worth of pancakes in a diner located across the street from a decommissioned municipal incinerator. Full of carbs, I would lie on our couch, a bent pipe between my lips and my Kindle in my hands. The cat would jump up on my stomach, turn around twice, stretch out and go to sleep. Within a half hour, I, too, would be asleep.

It was a comfortable and comforting thing to do on a lazy day off.

Alas, the old cat died and, a few months back, we acquired a kitten. She is a calico named Maggie and she moves through our house at an average speed of about 35 miles an hour, swinging from the curtains, playing with a lime green mouse-shaped toy, leaping straight up into the air with the distilled happiness of youth.

I glare resentfully from the couch, try to reach out and scoop her up but, if I do, she lights but briefly on my broad, flannel clad stomach before gathering her paws under her and leaping off me.

Ah, but, persistency at the most stupid of tasks is an American hallmark. How else can you explain the Republican Party's decades-long attempt to turn back the working class' clock to 1905? How else can you explain our involvement in Iraq? How else can you explain the Super Bowl?

I caught her the other night, found her napping on our bed. I slipped off my shoes, turned on the gentle reading light next to the bed and found a book on the nightstand.

She dozed off, rolled over on her back and slept with all four paws up, each one curled delicately at the wrist. I dozed off for a while myself. She wasn't sleeping on me but she was sleeping next to me and I was dreaming peacefully of those long winter days when I'm off from work and here's a fat book of medieval history to be read.

I believe that almost all we can use to oppose the world's madness and horror are manners and comfort.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.