Cats I have known and loved

I have been owned by a succession of cats since 1987.
It began when someone gave my daughter, who was 15 at the time, a beautiful little kitten she named Chevy. I balked at letting her keep Chevy because I was (and am) massively allergic to cats. But what can you do when your little girl is in love with a ball of fur? We took Chevy to the vet and got her her shots, and made arrangements for neutering, etc., when she was old enough. Two weeks later, however, she began having seizures, so one day while the kids were in school, I took her to the vet. She had distemper. The shots had come too late for her. I could have taken her home and let my daughter watch her slowly die, or have her put gently to sleep. Since, to this day, my daughter is bitter over my killing her cat, you know the choice I made. But on the advice of a friend, I did not go home empty handed. I took a little black tabby home with me so Kelly could have something small and soft to cuddle while she mourned poor Chevy. The black tabby was Shadow.

People may choose to bring cats into their homes, but cats decide with whom they will bond. Shadow had ear mites and worms and needed dosing and care that I had to provide since Kelly was in school all day and she decided to bond with me. Now I had killed Kelly’s first cat and stolen the affections of the second. That’s why, about a year later, Samantha, a seal point Siamese, came into our lives. Samantha was completely Kelly’s creature.

Shadow mothered Samantha and they developed a close relationship. About a year later, Roxie, an orange tabby, joined the zoo, and Shadow mothered her as well. Gemini, Tugger, MacGyver, Bubba, Lillian, Vivian, Sinbad, Rusty, Rosabelle and Patches succeeded Roxie. Poor Shadow. Each new addition after Roxie was greeted with a combination of irritability and dismay. Shadow, though the oldest, was not the alpha female, and the younger cats bullied her unless I protected her.

We never had more that five cats at a time, and after living with five cats for a couple of years, we found good homes for Gemini and Tugger and declared a three-cat maximum from that point on. Roxie died young of kidney failure. Fool that I am, I paid for dialysis trying to save that sweet cat. She greeted me every time I came in the door. We had a buffet by the front door, and as I came through it, she would be on the buffet, waiting to love on me and help me shake off the stresses of the day. I still miss her.
We were down to two cats, Shadow and Samantha. Then Kelly rescued a kitty from a dumpster (Gemini, so named because she looked like Shadow’s twin). THEN Kelly was given a gorgeous gray kitten as a tip on a Domino’s run that I named Tugger and we were back up to four cats. Gemini and Tugger really bonded with each other- they were kind of like feline, female Fred and George Weasleys. I really enjoyed them, but Dave was adamant about the three-cat rule. A friend of mine in graduate school had just lost her 18-year old cat- she had had the cat since she was five- and she was heart-broken. I offered her one of my cats, either Gemini or Tugger, but told her it was a wrench to separate them because they were so close to each other. She took them both, God bless her.
It’s funny. Of the two, I favored Tugger. My friend favored Gemini. People react to cats like they react to people. Some personalities just jibe with your own. Gemini was sweet and affectionate and a bit of a follower. Tugger was crazy, and wild, and fearless, and silly and a natural born leader. The two of them made life very interesting. Both Shadow and Samantha cried for days when they left, just like mama cats who have been separated from their kittens. It made me feel terrible. I missed them, too. But we were back to being a two-cat family again.
Then my son showed up with a huge, glorious black male who was clearly part Maine Coon, and my son expected to keep him. We had never had a male cat before, so I was a little leery, but it worked out that he was a terrific cat. What a character! I told Jake he could keep the cat if I could name him MacGyver- I was really into MacGyver at the time. The cat was well named as he seemed to live for adventure. Shortly on the heels of his joining the ladies, Bubba turned up. Bubba was another absolutely beautiful male, and as sweet a cat as I have ever met, but I don’t remember how it is he came to live with us.
The four cats got along well, but when my second granddaughter Haley was born, we found she was highly allergic to cats. (Jake’s family and Dave and I were sharing a house at the time.) Okay, the cats had to go. Kelly took in Shadow and Samantha and I found a good home for MacGyver and Bubba and for a while my house was catless.
[I must state here that I was able to find homes for these cats because they were healthy, neutered, and de-clawed. To those of you who have problems with the idea of de-clawing cats, I’ll just say deal with it. No cat with claws will ever live in my home. I value my belongings. Beyond that, the average life span of outdoor cats with their claws is 5 years. The average age for indoor cats who have been de-clawed is twice that. If you could ask the cats, I’d bet they say it was a fair trade-off. ]
Jake and his family moved out on Normandy Lake and during the moving-in process, found that two little kittens had been abandoned in their house. They were an awfully cute pair that Jake named Lillian and Vivian, and I have pictures of them nestled in Jake’s shirt pocket. Since they couldn’t live with Jake, they lived with me until I could find homes for them. In the meantime, since Jake wasn’t living with me anymore, I retrieved Shadow and Samantha from Kelly.
Then Jake bought a boat, and found that an adorable male kitten had been part of the package deal. We named him Sinbad. I can’t remember who adopted Sinbad, but do remember being sad to see him go.
Dave, Shadow, Samantha and I moved into the house we live in now in 1997. Shortly thereafter, my adorable next-door neighbor showed up with an orange tabby orphan that I instantly fell in love with. I named him Rusty. He used to be in the garage waiting for me when I got home from work every day and talked to me- mostly “feed me”, “water me”, “change the litter”, and “scratch me” but he was really good company while I did all those things. By now, Shadow was 10 and Samantha was 9 and they were too old and too jaundiced to be much amused or enamored of an active young male but I was. I only had Rusty a year. He had a bad habit of rushing the door to get outside, and he must have sneaked past us, probably while we were bringing in groceries, because dinnertime came, and there was no sign of him. We searched the neighborhood, handed out leaflets, but we never found a trace of him. A year later, the same thing happened with Samantha. She was almost 11 when she slipped out the door, something she NEVER did until we moved to this house, but was now making a habit, to my chagrin . I was getting ready for bed when I realized I hadn’t seen her in awhile, and searched the house for her. I searched the yard, the lot next door- no luck. I called. I whistled. (I have trained each of my cats to come to a whistle, believe it or not). A terrible thunderstorm came up, so severe it drove me back into the house. I kept expecting to see her run up onto the porch to get out of the weather but it didn’t happen. I don’t know if she went off to die like some animals do, or if the severe weather killed her, but she was gone, and I mourned her for weeks.
About this time, my son’s marriage broke up. Kendall and Haley’s mother, in an attempt, I think, to ingratiate herself to the girls, gave them each a kitten. Of course they couldn’t keep them, so I got a tearful call from Kendall, asking if the cats could come here to live so that the girls could at least visit them from time to time. Who says “no” to heartbroken child? So Rosabelle and Patches came to live with me. That was five years ago. Shadow just rolled her eyes, glared at me, and went into my bedroom to grumble under the bed. More damn kittens. Jeez.
Rosabelle was Haley’s cat, and she reminded me very much of Roxie. Last year, while Dave and I were in San Diego, Jake and the kids came over to swim and apparently let her out without knowing it. Normally, that would not have been a problem. The yard is now fenced, none of the cats could get out of the yard, and I often let them out in yard with me. Jake was coming back the next day to mow the grass for us and would have put her back in the house. Except that the moron pool guy- who really deserves a blog of his own in the future- came in the interim and left the gate open when he left. Jake found Rosabelle the next day. She had been mauled by dogs and did not survive.
Which brings us now to Shadow and Patches. Patches is Kendall’s cat, and is really a pig with fur. She eats constantly and is fat, fat, fat, even though I monitor her food and have her on a weight control cat food. She eats her food and then eats Shadow’s. She’s a bit of a knucklehead, but I really love her.
And Shadow… my dear old lady cat, whom I have had since 1987, died this afternoon of kidney failure. She has been failing for the past couple of years, and this year the decline has seemed to accelerate. She had lost her appetite and so lost a lot of weight, she was losing her fur in clumps, she had arthritis in her hips, and she was going blind. She had a bad tooth, so I had been treating her with antibiotics and today she was to have the tooth extracted. In preparation for surgery, the vet did blood work and found she was in acute kidney failure. Needless to say, he did not attempt to extract the tooth. She died at 2:30 pm. I went to get her with an air-tight plastic bin that contained a soft baby blanket she loved and her favorite toy. Terry was very sensitive and laid my dear girl out so that she looked like a kitten sleeping. Dave and I buried her in the backyard and will plant flowers in the spring. She would have been 19 in April. Nineteen. I had had her for fully half my marriage.

The ironic thing is that two nights ago, when the temperature dipped below freezing, Dave told me to bring in a kitten that has been hanging around on the front porch for days. He’s not fond a kittens but had no desire to see one freeze to death. The kitty obviously belongs to someone as she is wearing a very expensive collar. She seems to think she lives here now and has been tormenting Patches for two days, which may actually be a good thing as it may run some of the fat off of her. But tomorrow, I am going to take Baby Kitty’s picture and make flyers to hand out in the neighborhood. Somebody thought enough of her to give her that fancy collar. Someone may love her and be missing her. I know how that feels.