What is it about me? Why do the women in my life keep taking in cats?
Years ago it was my wife and daughters bringing me a white-as-snow stray, asking if we could keep her. I said okay. They called her “Ghost” and she was around for a while and then passed away.
After that I was on a trip to Spain and called home to check in, and discovered the phone message had been changed to add the name “Pandora” to the list of people who resided at that number. I said, “Who the hëll is Pandora?” to the empty hotel room. It was only later I discovered that a small gray cat had been embraced by my family and dubbed “Pandora” for reasons that escape me.
I was tasked with bringing her to the vet, who informed me that the animal was pregnant. He felt her belly and said, “I’d say she’s got three kittens in there.” He offered to spay her immediately, thus effectively terminating the pregnancy. Holding three lives in my hands, and knowing that no one else in my family would ever have to know, I couldn’t do it. I let the pregnancy come to term, and sure enough, three kittens were born. One of them died fairly young when he was stupid enough to square off against an on-coming truck and challenge it to take its best shot, but the other two are still with us, along with two more that we adopted from Bide-A-Wee (one to replace the one who was killed and the other to be Kathleen’s cat.)
So last Thursday, on a day that had been storming on and off, Kathleen calls down to me from upstairs and says, “I need your help.” I walk up the stairs and stop. There’s Kathleen with a shivering, sopping wet tiny bundle of black and white fur wrapped in the bottom of her shirt. The kitten had wound up stuck in the branches of our front tree and, when Kath finally got it down, clung to her in a “Please don’t let me go” manner. I’m not sure who gave me a more pathetic look: Kathleen or the cat.
I made some half-hearted calls to no-kill shelters, but they all have waiting lists, and I knew it was pointless. Once Caroline got home from school and lay eyes on it, the kitten wasn’t going anywhere.
Since then (and one vet visit later) she (yes, it’s a female) has taken up residence in our kitchen in order to keep her separate from the other animals until we know for sure that she’s healthy. Caroline dubbed her “Figaro” or simply “Fig” for short. There’s a picture of her up on Kath’s site.
Some people have said I have animal magnetism, but I didn’t know it meant that we keep attracting animals.
PAD
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I’ve had cats my whole life, but not one of them was ever acquired though adoption or purchase. Cats just always seem to move in with me (quite literally in two cases, one of which was a cat that belonged to a neighbor until he, the cat, decided one day that he liked our house better, and no one objected… my parents still have him, nearly 20 years later, even though they’ve moved to a different city).
Stony Brook was full of stray cats, at least when I was attending a few years back. You’d see them roaming by the dorm buildings late at night all the time. Which always perplexed me, since presumably they wouldn’t be coming from on campus but the outer part of campus is surrounded by a wall of trees and not too close to any houses. I don’t really know, but yea I knew some people that would food out for them and what not.
That’s more or less how we acquired Orpheus about fifteen years ago; we just found this little ball of fur all of three weeks old, and it was clear that he was going to stay with us. Which he did, until passing away from feline lymphoma in ’07.
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Nowadays we’re apparently outsourcing: our two current cats (Ariel and Puck) were found by one of Lisa’s colleagues instead of by us directly.
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TWL
who also had a Pandora, for nearly nineteen years
Because you’re a soft touch with a big heart. You poor dumb sap.
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Now if you ruled the roost like a real he-man, this would never happen.
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Bill (who also has 5 cats and a sorrier lot they could not be. There’s Coal, a bobtailed Norwegian Forest cat who was in the house when I came back from a trip one Christmas and has managed to put me in the hospital for a week; Starsky, a polydactyl tabby with OCD my wife picked out of a litter from a friend’s house; Val, a tiny gray girl to replace the late beloved Obi and who is deaf as a post and has about as many teeth left in here head as a jack-o-lantern and/or West Virginian; Ash, a wonderful Cornish rex who is the only cat we bought from a breeder since we really wanted a C.rex but given what we now know about the breeder he should also be classified as a rescue (AND he has a heart condition); and Ichi, a one eyed cat we saw at Petco. I’ll take the blame for that one; after 2 weeks this incredibly lovable and affectionate girl had no takers. What, I’m going to turn down a one-eyed cat?)
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(Jerry can confirm all of this along with the salient fact that our 5 cats do not all get along forcing us to live with an elaborate series of doors and modified baby fences. We should be sent to home for the insane but then who would care for the cats?)
“(AND he has a heart condition)”
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The cat and not the breeder that is. Well, the breeder may also have a heart condition, but I’ve never met him.
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“Jerry can confirm all of this along with the salient fact that our 5 cats do not all get along forcing us to live with an elaborate series of doors and modified baby fences.”
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It’s quite true and quite elaborate. They’re also quite particular in just how they let you share a couch with them in between the hours of 3 and 5 AM.
I do have to say that little Figaro does look pretty cute!
My wife has a saying– “Cats happen.”
I’ve looked at that picture and after looking at the face, I’ve come to the conclusion that someone has cloned one of my cats and let Figaro loose in your area. They all have that black & white patchwork look but Fig looks most like Peter instead of his siblings Paul and Mary. How the cloners managed to make a clone of a male cat into a female, I don’t know but those cloners are careful.
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I perfectly understand about the stray cat thing. They just show up and use that unerring radar to bring them right onto target where the suckers are…like me. There’s a new pair of cats that are formally my neighbors that have decided that I need to keep care of them too. I’ve taken to calling the Kei and Yuri.
“Clever.” I meant to write “cloners are clever.” I guess I wasn’t “careful” enough
Here’s a quote I pulled from the Mutts website along with a comment when I shared it w/my Facebook friends
Animals are such agreeable friends. They ask no questions, they pass no judgments.
~ Unknown
Well, except maybe cats.
Dave Barry’s discussion of this was always wonderful:
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“Dogs always have a guilty look about them. If you could convey to a dog the seriousness of the JFK assassination, they would all immediately confess. Compare this to a cat, at least two of whom were seen on the grassy knoll.”
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(From memory, so almost certainly not an exact quote.)
Here’s a sure sign that I’ve been reading Peter’s work for waaaay too long: I immediately assumed the name “Figaro” was taken from Angela Tensen’s reanimated kitten. The cat from “Pinocchio” didn’t occur to me until later. Yeesh. 🙂
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In any case, that’s a cute kitten. Glad she was rescued.
I was thinking of the opera, so of course I’m thinking, “Wow, that’s pretty sophisticated for such a young girl.” Totally forgot about the cat from Pinocchio.
You’re not alone. The first thing that came to mind when PAD mentioned “Figaro” was the kitten in JUSTICE #26.
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This adorable kitten has a happier ending. I’m glad it found a good and loving home. :^)
You’re a lucky man to have so many wonderful feline friends in your family. I’ve had cats since I was 9, and I don’t think I could live without them. Almost all my current cats are rescues (one came to us pregnant and eventually moved in with one of her babies. Another was given to us by animal control as thanks for catching strays after our calico died. A fourth was living on our porch, saw the third, and fell in love. He just walked in and never left. And we’re fostering two more right now for reasons I can’t discuss.).
I can’t wait until I get around to finding an orange tabby boy I can name “Naruto”.
Peter, you guys are Stray Cat Central because ya got Cat Class and ya got Cat Style… but you’re not the only magnet for stray fuzzies out there. I could tell you all manner of stories, but it’d take up a whole lotta time. All I’ll say for myself is, Clara and I have three, but only because we have to limit things in a one-bedroom apartment. Baby was our landlord’s cat; we adopted him after his owner died. Bunny is a street kitten we rescued. And Pooka is a sable tuxedo tom we adopted in’03, right after we moved to Nashville; he’s spoiled rotten, loves diced ham and speaks enough English to ask for it.
Clara calls them our children. How can I argue, especially when Bunny will curl up on my pillow when I’m asleep and purr all over me?
Btw, unless you have a copy in the household library, see about finding a copy of “The House Guests” by John D. MacDonald. Wonderful book, worth having.
Cats have been moving in with me all my life. I assume this happens to anyone who doesn’t cruelly chase them away.
Does this mean that if I show up on your doorstep looking wet and pathetic that I get free room and board, or the cops called?
This is why I stay away from the section of Petsmart where they have adoptable kittens on display. I’m a sucker for a cute cat, but we already have three plus a greyhound (a dog, not a bus). There’s only so much room in the house!
That’s how we ended up with Whitecat. Stace was working with a woman who had to get rid of her cat or lose her apartment, so she brings Snowbell home. Mr. Smokey, the black cat that used to ride around the neighborhood on my shoulder, was not pleased. He was even less pleased when we brought Brian home a few months later.
But, to answer your initial question, maybe it’s the way you strut….
Man, I *wish* I had a stable place to live where I could take in stray cats. Pictured in my icon is my darling rescue kitten Iggy, who AFAIK still lives with my former host family as the most privileged cat in central Albania. I found him abandoned as a newborn by the neighborhood trash heap and hand-fed him to 5 weeks, when the host fam adopted him. Did I mention I’m allergic to cats? Iggy was more than worth it.
One stretch when my first wife and I were homeless (not enough jobs in 1989), and living out of state parks in Washington, a little tortoiseshell just kind of appeared out of the salal bushes and adopted us. Due to the weather and her way of simply appearing from and disappearing into the underbrush, she became Misty the Ninja Commando Cat.
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No, I wasn’t going to chase her off. Sure, I could barely feed the three of us humans, but the cat hunted for her own food a lot too…
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I think I know why your kitten was named Pandora, though, PAD. After all, she did come with her very own box of troubles…
How has no one asked if the Stray Cats Strut yet?