Cat Memories

Red Kitty as a youngster-almost a year old.

Mabel, often had an unpleasant, unhappy facial expression, but he was a sweety-pie.

Mabel: In your face

Cats as artwork

I was looking for something else last night when I came across these old cat photos. When Red Kitty was very young, he wandered on to our farm in Iowa. I was out of town teaching a summer school workshop for a few weeks when my stepdaughters spotted him, fell in love, and began to quietly leave him food (we already had 3 other cats.)

When I got home, they told me about him and how nice he was, but how their dad didn't want another cat around. I met him, a beautiful orange cat, quite young, dark orange eyes and a wonderful personality. But we were slated to go on a family vacation and I didn't see how we could commit to him right then. So I told the girls that if he was still around when we got home, we would see about keeping him.

Sure enough, he was still hanging around upon our return. To convince dad that he was a keeper, we gave him dad's childhood nickname: Red. Then the deal was, Red Kitty couldn't come into the house until we had him neutered because our other cats were all fixed males, ranging in age from about 16 down to about 2 years old. He wasn't really feral, we figured he was born and grew up on some neighboring farm, but had to move on when he got older. I got an appointment with our vet, and we took him in for "the fix." Then he joined our big happy family.

Our oldest cat, at the time, was Raoul, a huge white cat I had rescued back when I lived in Anchorage who had pretty much been with me or with a friend in Chicago ever since the late '80's. Next in line was Mabel, so named because HE was not correctly sexed when adopted by the family. Mabel was such a character and was also a big orange kitty, a bit older than Red. Finally, Bob, a mutant who was born with this strange crooked stump of a tail but was otherwise just a big, beautiful striped tiger with the sweetest personality.

Red Kitty gave us a lot of chose calls as a young man. One night, he came in after a night out and I was puzzled why he was eating so strangely. When I took a closer look, I realized his tongue was totally split down the middle so, with two separate halves, he couldn't really eat or drink. I'm grateful I had a wonderful country vet at the time who more than once met me at the clinic on weekends and other off hours. I rushed Red to the clinic, he was stitched up, healed up quickly since he was such a youngster, and all was well.

Which brings me to why I was searching for photos tonight. I saw the link on "Holy Cuteness" about animals in casts and I loved it..but also remembered the time Red Kitty spent in a leg cast, a bright florescent green one, in fact. That's a good story I'll save until I find that photo. Suffice it to say, Red Kitty got a running start on using up his 9 lives! To be continued!