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Beware the old, old cougar
10/26/2009 12:34 AM   1 comment(s) on this story E-mail this story to a friend

I was alarmed to read the other day about the 107-year-old cougar on the prowl in Malaysia. You may find that incredible since reliable sources such as Wikipedia give the cougar's average life span in the wild as 8 to 13 years. There may be a few 15-year-olds in the Edisto swamps or along the Savannah River around Silver Bluff, but nothing approaching the age of Wook Kundor.

In 21st-century parlance, a cougar is an older woman who hooks up with and maybe even marries a younger man. So as soon as I read about Wook Kundor, I scratched whatever plans I might once have had for traveling to Malaysia.

Thank goodness cougars had not been invented when last I was eligible for romance and matrimony. Miss Peggy is younger than I, and a fetching lass she was (and is). I'm trying hard not to make her a cougar.

Ms. Kundor has been married 22 times and is looking for husband (victim?) No. 23. Her current husband is 37 years old, and she's afraid he's casting about for something younger, once he gets out of drug rehab.

No. 22 is Muhamad Noor Che Musa. He said he married Ms. Kundor because he found "peace and a sense of belonging" in her company. At first, he sympathized with her because she was childless, old and alone, but later that sympathy turned to love.

Yeah, right.

A couple of questions arise: How did Ms. Kundor manage to emerge childless from 22 marriages? And what kind of drug has Muhamad been ingesting? If you could find out what he was on, you could make a fortune peddling it to affluent cougars in the United States: "Come over here, Big Boy, and let me doctor that drink with something potent. The chicks will flip for you." Come to think of it, maybe that's what songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were marketing in 1959 under the name "Love Potion No. 9."

On sober reflection, it makes sense for a woman to marry a younger man. The average girl born in 2009 is expected to live more than five years longer than the average boy. So the woman who wants to lower her chances of winding up widowed should be out looking for a handsome dude five years her junior.

On the other hand, a woman who wants a little variety in her married life should pick out a husband 10 or 15 years older. That would give her, on average, 15 to 20 years of prowling time as a cougar without going through a messy divorce or risking exposure as an adulteress.

Of course, the law of averages has its loopholes. The beautiful Nancy Moore married Strom Thurmond in 1968 when he was 66 and she was 22. They separated amicably in 1991, when she was a still-lovely 48 and he was 89. Strom lived to be 101, and Nancy has never remarried. She bore the senator four children to go with the child of his youth, whose mother was a family domestic.

The venerable senator was married only twice during his long lifetime. His first marriage was childless, entered into at the age of 47 when he was governor of South Carolina. Jean Crouch Thurmond died in 1960 of a brain tumor, and the sage of Edgefield waited eight years to remarry.

I've interviewed several centenarians within a half-century of journalism, but the most memorable was a man in Aiken County who said he was 110 years old and remembered being a slave. I remember some vivid portions of the interview, but can't for the life of me recall his name. So I'll call him Methuselah.

I interviewed him in 1956, which meant that he would have been 19 when the Civil War ended. A reputable Aikenite, born in the late 19th century, confirmed that he had known Methuselah all his life and always knew him as an adult.

Matrimonially speaking, Methuselah was a piker compared to Ms. Kundor, but reproductively speaking he far outdistanced her. He had been married only four times, but had 22 children "that I know of." He was married at the time of the interview to a 70-year-old woman. She met his basic criterion, which was to be old enough to cook and "young enough to answer me."

He was a tough old soul who could laugh heartily and toothlessly: He told me he removed all is bad teeth with a hammer and nail. I wish I could recapture the story from that interview, but alas, it has either moldered to dust in the clip files of The Augusta Chronicle, is sleeping peacefully on a microfiche or has found a resting place in cyberspace.

Anybody with that fortitude could survive encounters with the fiercest of cougars and would make a worthy partner of Wook Kundor.

Ms. Kundor did not say whether she could cook or was still able to "answer" her husband, if she ever could. But she still tells a poignant story.

"Lately there is this kind of insecurity in me," she told one interviewer. "I realize that I am an aged woman. I don't have the body, nor am I a young woman who can attract anyone."

Maybe not. But I remember a remark once made by Garrison Keillor on "Prairie Home Companion" during one of his famous "cougar" routines. He told about the time he was a small boy alone on Halloween and afraid to walk down the streets of Lake Wobegon for fear that a cougar might be lurking on an overhanging limb, waiting to pounce on him.

Someone had assured him that a cougar is just afraid of a human as a human is of a cougar.

"But what if it's an old cougar," he mused, "with nothing to lose?"

That's what would worry me about going to Malaysia, and I would advise Methuselah to steer clear of the place.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Drive, Anderson SC 29625 or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com.

Gene Owens is a retired newspaper editor and columnist who graduated from Graniteville High School and now lives in Anderson.


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  1 comment(s) on this story

:  10/26/2009

I thought this article was going to be about weekends at the Holley House.

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