An Accumulation of Cats -- Part I: First There Were Two

I have always loved cats, and in late 1996, I felt that age 48 was mature enough to assume the responsibility of pet guardianship. I was living in the apartment on 21st street at the time and by then I had been doing medical transcription for 10 years, and had been working from home for about 2 years. I decided I wanted two males and I wanted to raise them from kittens. The city pound seemed the ideal place to look for kittens who needed a home, but it turned out that they would not adopt out cats younger than a year old. I searched the want ads for people who had kittens to give away, but found none. Then I heard that a friend and colleague had a cat who had just had a litter of kittens.

If you are destined to have cats, sometimes you get to choose which cat you'll have, and sometimes the world chooses one for you. My friend did not know she was supposed to have a cat until the world gave her one. It seems a feral cat had been moving her litter to a new location and as she was carrying one of them along the top of their fence, she accidently dropped it and it fell down behind an oil drum that had been pushed into a corner of the fence. The space where it fell was large enough for a kitten to fall through but too small for the family's pet Labrador to get into; Unfortunately, it was also too small for the mother to get into either. My friend's daughters saw the dog barking frantically at the oil drum and when they went out to investigate, they found the kitten, rescued it from its predicament, and adopted it. It was a female kitten and the girls christened her "Angel" because "she fell from above." There were four kittens in Angel's first litter. The first two kittens, a male and and female, were born on 03/21/1997; the second two, both females, were born almost 24 hours later.

My friend was quite willing to let me take half of Angel's litter off her hands at one fell swoop. I definitely wanted the male, and the female I chose was the eldest one, the one who had been born at the same time as the little male. I based my choice on the rationale that since they were born together, they should stay together. All four kittens were black and grey mackerel tabbies like their mother, and the only way I could tell my two apart without getting rudely personal was that the little female had three white toes on her left forepaw. I named the male Jett and the female Shadow. Fortunately, as the kitties grew older, it became much easier to tell them apart.

The one I named Jett (at left and below right) proved to be high strung and skittish. He had a "hair trigger," and between one instant and the next, he could kick in his afterburner and vanish in a puff of cat hair. He was a high flyer and thought nothing of scaling my china cabinet, which is 7 feet tall, and would leap from the bathroom counter to the top of the bathroom door and perch there. He was a long, tall boy, on the large end of the size spectrum, and his normal, healthy weight was around 15 lbs.

One day, I had gone to a colleague's house to talk to her about the national service she was working for, with the idea of helping her do some work for them on a part time basis. On my way over, I picked up a pair of Josie's burritos for our lunch. As she was eating hers, a red bean (the kind Mexican refried beans are made from) fell out of it onto the floor. Before it had bounced once, one of her cats caught it and snarfed it. Turned out her cats loved red beans. The next time I had refried beans, I offered my two kitties a little dollop. Sure enough, once they'd gotten a good sniff of it, down the hatch it went. From then on, I couldn't open a can of refried beans or bean dip without them begging for their "share." Jett also had a "sweet tooth" for margerine.

I had decided that Jett and Shadow were going to be strictly indoor kitties. So, in addition to neutering them both, I had them both completely declawed. (Some people feel that declawing a cat is inhumane, but to me it seems more humane than spraying noxious smelling chemicals all over the furniture and yelling at them for the rest of their lives in an effort to "train" them not to shred the upholstery.) The vet I took them to had started using a tissue glue instead of sutures to close the incisions. When I brought Jett home, put his crate on the bed and opened it to let him out, he left little bloody footprints as he walked across the quilt. Aghast, I rushed him back to the vet, who realized the tissue glue they had used on Jett was defective and hadn't been sticky enough to hold the skin edges together. They had to bandage his little paws with 4 x 4 gauze pads and Kling wrap them. For the better part of that next week, our theme song was "Shake your booties." The vet at the clinic I was going to at the time didn't seem too concerned about having used defective glue on poor Jett and were rather cavalier about the whole thing. That was when I stopped going to that vet clinic and started going to the clinic I go to now.

As it turned out, Shadow (pictured at right) was aptly named as well. As a kitten, she had had the classic mackerel tabby pattern of black stripes against a light grey background, but as her adult coat came in, the shadows of tortoise shell markings began to appear, with clearly defined areas where the grey background changed to a light russet brown, and black stripes became dark umber. Her coat was as lush and soft as velour. She was the same height as Jett but not as long, and she was deeper through the body from back to belly. As she matured, her stockier body gave her a charming, slightly chubby look -- pleasingly plump. She had the sweetest little round face. She was my little brown girl and she liked to be near me. At some point, inexplicably, I started calling her "Sister" -- and she answered to it.

The apartment had a "shotgun" style layout, with a hall that started just to the left of the front door and went past a closet, the bathroom and the first bedroom, and dead-ended about 20 feet later at the back bedroom door. My dad is not a cat lover, and is firmly convinced that every loose cat hair in the place immedately seeks him out and gets on him the minute he walks in the front door of my abode. I ended up putting a bifold door at the front end of the hall to keep the kitties out of the living/dining room area. That way, when I had company, I wouldn't worry about the kitties slipping out the open front door, and when my folks came over, my dad would not have to deal with the kitties. It got to the point that whenever the doorbell rang, the kitties would go hide in the bedroom and I could just shut the bifold door behind them. However, on one occasion, I had a cable guy come to put a second cable outlet in my bedroom. He was in and out several times and once he left, I couldn't find Sister. I searched the apartment from top to bottom, looking everywhere for her. I called and called for her. She was completely declawed, she had never been out of the apartment except in a carrier, and she was very distrustful of strangers. I was terrified that she had been "caught out" by the cable guy, had been frightened of him and had "escaped" by bolting out the front door. I searched the neighborhood frantically for almost two hours, calling her and rattling the sack of treats, desperately afraid that she had become too confused, disoriented and frightened to respond. The area where I lived was bound by three very busy streets, and that knowledge kept circling like vultures in my mind. By then, I was over an hour late for work. I went back to my apartment, heart sick at the thought that I might never find her again. As I was sitting on the couch trying to pull myself together, a little brown furry body came oozing out from beneath the skirting around the footstool that went with a wing chair. There was only about 3 inches of clearance between the bottom of the foot stool and the floor, and it had never occurred to me to look there since it didn't seem possible that 14 pounds of cat could squeeze herself into such a small space! Guess again!

The back bedroom was my "office." When I wasn't working, that door stayed shut. But on the days when I worked, they would go back to the office with me and keep me company. The apartments had been built in the 1960s, and the electrical outlets were the original ones. There was one outlet where I had plugged in the UPS device I plugged my computer equipment into. One day, I noticed Sister sniffing around the faceplate of that outlet. Something about it had attracted and held her attention. This went on for several days. Finally, I got down and smelled it for myself, and caught the distinctive odor of ozone. Not the sort of smell one likes to have coming from an electrical outlet! I mentioned it to my landlord's daughter-in-law, who was managing the apartments for him, and she had an electrician come out to check the outlet. Turned out the source of the ozone was a pair of bare wires inside the outlet that were arcing! The electrician said it was a good thing I noticed the ozone smell and recognized it for the danger signal it was. Those arcing wires could very easily have started a fire. Now, my mother's sense of smell is quite acute, -- she's got a nose like a beagle -- but my sense of smell is not very good at all. I had to practically stick my nose in the outlet in order to smell the ozone. I'd have never been aware of it if Sister hadn't noticed it first and shown such a persistent interest in it.

I was quite happy with the two kitties I had. I had neither plans nor desire to get any more and for a little over two years, it was just the two kitties and me. I might also note that instead of requiring a pet deposit, my landlord simply raised the rent $20 a month per pet, and two was all I could afford.

Welcome to the Confusion Couch

There are as many reasons to enjoy Pibgorn, the comic strip created by Brooke McEldowney, (hereinafter referred to as "The Cannon") as there are people who enjoy it, and there’s quite a collection of them here. These enjoyers of Pibgorn (hereinafter referred to as “we”) are a diverse and motley assemblage bound together in mutual confusion by the uncommon thread of this comic and the very uncommon man who perpetrates it (from the Latin, perpetrare, “to completely bring about”). If you take the time to read the comments, you’ll discover quite an interesting cross section of humanity has accumulated on the cushions of the confusion couch. It was Brooke himself who christened us the Order of the Couch (hereinafter referred to as “OTC”).

If the strip has piqued your interest, I would suggest checking out the resources (hereinafter referred to as “the boilerplate”) that one of our number has collected and so kindly makes available every day. That is a good introduction to The World of Pibgorn (hereinafter referred to as “the Pibverse”). If your interest is piqued enough to want to dig deeper, and if you have sufficient disposable income at your disposal, becoming a member (“Genius”) of GoComics would be the easiest way to access the archives so that you may follow the thread from its beginning. However, Real Life (hereinafter referred to as “RL”) being what it is these days, if you have more time than money, you can always use the devious and circuitous method explained earlier in today’s comments to get to the East by sailing West (hereinafter referred to as “the Columbus method”).

In any case, feel free to check out our virtual digs, have a sit down on the virtual couch, and help yourself to the virtual goodies. We have a fully equipped virtual clubhouse here, with a hot tub, a pool, a library and various other virtual amenities. The llama is Llefty and the goat is Gruff (in name only). We also have several escadrilles of fruit bats aloft at any given time. They are all quite tame. They and the squirrel squadron (AKA The Crumb Police) help clear away the leftovers. Our volunteer virtual librarian has been compiling a list of books we have recommended to each other along the way. I also seem to recall someone was collecting recommended recipes. One hopes that, at some point, links to same will be added to the boilerplate.

One of the virtues of virtual couches is that there’s always room for one more.

In Memoriam

Jett Catt

03/21/1997 - 05/11/2009

For more than 3 years, he fought against diabetes, but its inevitable complications had begun to take their grim toll. Today, I made the difficult decision to put an end to what had obviously become a losing battle. This afternoon, he peacefully closed his eyes in sleep one last time and at 4:45 pm, he set off across the Rainbow Bridge to join his sister and littermate Shadow. He has been a dear and beloved companion these past 12 years, and he will be greatly missed.

* * * * *
That was such a hard email to write. Can't believe he's been gone for over a month now. Someday soon, I need to blog about the both of them, Jett and his sister Shadow. Two dear, sweet souls of the kitty purrsuasion.

Dizzy Dean, Modeling Clay, and the Game of the Week

It would have been in the 1950's, about '55-'56-'57. My Mom and Dad had built their first house, and we moved into it the summer I turned 6. It had three bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen, living room, a one-car garage, and a den.

The den was an oblong room. It and the kitchen formed an "L" shape, with the den being the longer leg. The living room was on the inside of the "L" and the garage on the opposite side. It had knotty pine paneling. Like the kitchen, it had those old foot-square, "asphalt" tiles on the floors, off white with dark green dribbles. The dinette set (table and four matching chairs) was on the living room side on the end near the kitchen, followed by a doorway into the living room that had a set of "bar-room" swinging doors and then my dad's recliner. On the garage side of the room was the door to the garage, a 1950's answer to a futon couch, and a built-in bookcase with two cabinets beneath it. The television (we just had one) was at the end of the room, up against the windows that looked out on the back yard. It was a Motorola TV, black and white.

My dad loved sports, and it was right about that time that they started broadcasting sports games on TV and in the summer time, they would broadcast baseball games played by all those great old teams: The Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Yankees, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Boston Red Socks and the Braves, the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Chicago White Sox and the Cubs, the Baltimore Orioles, the Cincinnati Reds, The Cleveland Indians.

Television wasn't all that much older than I was then, and it hadn't been all that long ago when the only way you could "see the game" was to go down to the statium, buy a ticket, and watch it from the stands. Your only other option was to listen to the announcers describe it to you on the radio. In fact, the games that were being broadcast on TV were using the same audio feed that went out over the radio, only with two or three strategically placed TV cameras up in the stands to show you what was happening on the field.

Football is a fast-paced, busy game. It has time limits; things have to happen within a certain period of time, and you can be penalized for taking too long to do something. There's a countdown clock on the scoreboard, and when that clock gets to zero, the game's over and everybody goes home. Baseball, however, is a open-ended game. Sure, the game starts at a certain time, but after that, it takes as long as it takes. It's played at a different pace. If you went to the ballpark to watch a game, you planned on being gone all afternoon and probably not getting home until dark. And in those early days of TV, that's the way they broadcast it. No cutting to commercial. No fancy onscreen graphics. None of this frenetic flick-flick-flick back and forth from image to image, no slo-mo instant replays. In those early days of television, the announcers were all important.

While one team was taking the field, and the other was going back to the dugout, it was up to the announcers to take up the slack just like they did on radio. -- They might mention one of the sponsors and give a product plug, or recap the inning up to that point. While the batter was fixing his hat, and digging his cleats in, and hitching at his uniform shirt, and rubbing dirt into his hands, the announcers would keep your attention by giving you some of his stats, or mentioning some colorful little biographical tidbit about him or one of the other players. While the pitcher and the catcher were deciding what to pitch or the pitcher was going through his little song and dance on the mound before he would actually wind up and throw, the announcers would be commenting, filling the time with useful, interesting or intertaining information. And the announcers always worked in pairs so they could play off each other. One would be the stats man and have reams of baseball stats ready to hand, and the other would provide the "color" -- the little anecdotes, and bits of personal trivia.

My dad loved sports, especially baseball, and he would always watch the "Game of the Week" on Saturday afternoons. The announcers were Dizzy Dean and some other guy whose name I don't ever think I knew. Not surprisingly, Dizzy Dean was the "color" man. He had a bazillion anecdotes from his days in baseball, and he had nearly as good a command of the English language as the inimitable Yogi Berra. The home plate umpire would decide to interrupt the game, walk halfway out to the mound and ask to see the baseball, and right on cue, Dizzy would launch into some anecdote about the fielding team's third baseman who missed three games last season because he got cleated in the ankle when the runner "slud" in to third base on a "dribbler" that got past their shortstop.

I wasn't all that into baseball in particular or sports in general, but the sounds that came out of that old Motorola TV were a part of my world. I guess that's why Dizzy Dean caught my ear. Even at that early age, I was aware that the "TV people" talked differently from the people in my childhood world way out in the flatlands of the Texas Panhandle. Nobody on the TV (unless it was a locally produced commercial for some local business) pronounced the words the same way, or used them in the same way. The sounds were different, the rhythms were different. Except for Dizzy Dean. He sounded like the people in my world. Hearing him and that other guy announcing the games was like a dialog between my world and the world of the TV people.

I can see that den so clearly. Looking down it from the end of the kitchen, backlit from the glare of the windows behind the TV. We had screen doors on both the front and back doors, and in the summertime, the back door would be open, there'd be a baseball game on TV and my younger brother would be crouched on the floor in front of the TV.

My brother was a spindly, knobby-kneed kid, three years my junior, with bad allergies and asthma and, as a result, he couldn't play outside a lot. He liked sports. We had baseball gloves, a bat and ball, and he had a baseball cap. He had baseball cards. But through circumstances beyond his control, for him there was no little league, no games with the neighborhood kids, only the occasional game of catch with my dad. Still, he found his own way to play baseball, on his terms, indoors, all by himself.

The 1950's equivalent of Play-Doh was modeling clay. It was oily, stiff, wouldn't dry out, and came in four colors: Red, yellow, blue and green. Inevitably, the colors would get all mixed together and it would end up this blechy greenish dark grey. My brother would get a lump of modeling clay and use it to lay out a complete baseball diamond on the floor. He would painstakingly roll the clay into long strings about the thickness of raw spaghetti and press it flat on the tile for his foul lines. He'd carefully form pieces of clay into little square base bags, use a kitchen knife to cut out a clay home plate, and form a pitcher's mound out of clay. For his baseball teams, he would use those old green plastic army men with “stands” that came in 50-count bags for some ridiculously low price. He and his teams du jour of little army guys would play game after game there on the floor. He would do all the sound effects -- the crack of the ball against the bat, the roar of the crowd, the announcers' commentary. He'd spend hours recreating on the floor what he watched on TV.

It took a lot of time to lay out his little baseball diamonds and, once he got one made, he wanted to leave it there -- for weeks! He would become quite irate if it was disturbed in any way. It would drive my mom crazy. My mom is a neat freak. It is her mission in life to rid the world of "piles of crud." If you are not actually reading a book or magazine, you couldn't just set it aside and come back to it later; it had to be closed and put away (if it was a magazine, you'd better take it to your room and hide it, because if it had been in the house more than a day or two, it was likely to get thrown away!). The instant you are done playing with a toy or game, she wants it picked up and put away. If you were working one of those 500- or 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles as my dad and I loved to do, or you were playing some board game, or coloring in a coloring book, or constructing a little room with cardboard furniture in a shoebox, or putting a plastic model together, or making a blanket cave/hideout/secret headquarters, or whatever else you might be doing, you'd better be able to finish it in the time you had available so that when you had to stop playing, you could "put all that crud away." But, since my brother was the youngest and because he frequently couldn't play outdoors, she'd suck it up and let him have his baseball diamonds on the floor. But even he would periodically have to scrape them up so she could sweep and mop. I think about two weeks was her maximum, ultimate limit.