The Way of Cats

Here are my cats, who helpfully let themselves illustrate points throughout the blog.

Puffy, the Greta Garbo Cat

Last modified on 2008-12-28 19:38:19 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

I got Puffy from a Christian biker filmmaker, who was in despair over this little ball of fluff finding a home like his littermates. He was extraordinarily shy, and by the time I socialized him, I had concluded the process would be even longer and more difficult for his next home, so he shouldn’t go any further.

This wasn’t a downside; I had fallen in love. I named him Smokepuff, since he was as silent and delicate as a puff of smoke, and he quickly became Puffy.

Puffy is the ultimate Gamma cat. Uninterested in other cats, devoted to his people, and dependent on steady routines and his undisturbed places. When I vacuum his pillow and put it back in the same place, he is still suspicious of it for a few hours until he is satisfied it has not changed that much. When we put new furniture in the living room and threw out the broken down couch, he wouldn’t come in. “How long will this last?” Dear Husband wanted to know. “In two weeks, he’ll forget it was ever any other way,” I said, and so it was.

We adore Puffy, but it cannot be denied he is not the brightest bulb in the chandelier. It’s not that he doesn’t have thought processes, they just move so slowly that observers can be forgiven for thinking they are not taking place at all.

He has a tendency to panic when Dear Husband and I wear hats. This apparently changes our profile in his head enough for him to doubt that he recognizes us. Since strangers make him panic, the reflex operates even after he gets a good look at us, sans hat. While his face lights up happily, his legs still try to run away, though usually in different directions.

We think he has tenuous connections throughout his nervous system. He is capable of grace once all his limbs settle on a plan, yet tends to fall off even the most large, flat, and stationary objects. His tongue, especially, seems to operate independently. He will lick his chops after a treat past all possibility that any residual flavor remains.

One night I was relating to Dear Husband my friend B’s theory that Puffy is actually a misunderstood genius, prompted by Puffy coming out for his evening treats. This evening his tongue, post-treat, went a little wild, in the fashion of a broken windowshade. It continued its motions so long that even he noticed, and thus he kept putting his limbs in front of it, apparently thinking that he had been interrupted mid-cleaning. He seemed incapable of reining it in.

When I realized what was going on, I had to perform a “Puffy Reset” which is accomplished by gently and firmly pressing down on the top of his head. This reboots the system and restores him to tranquility.

As Puffy sat there blinking from his reset, Dear Husband said, “Tell B I think she is mistaken.”

We had put a toy in an empty tissue box with the little plastic window, a favorite way of getting more use out of it. Puffy had enjoyed it for a few days, with us putting the toy back in once he got it out. This evening he was staring at the dark picture on the back of the box, and poking his paw at it. Just a little confused about which dark area contained the toy. After we stopped laughing, we turned the box around for him. He brightened. Oh, there it is.

I often don’t tell Puffy stories except to my close friends, since people might misunderstand, and think I’m making fun of Puffy. Well, this is the way Puffy is, and we wouldn’t change a molecule. Because Puffy also possesses one of the biggest, sweetest, fluffiest hearts in all of catdom. When he sits at our feet and gazes up at us with melting joy in his eyes, it’s a reminder that it doesn’t matter than he isn’t the smartest cat in the world. (That would be James Bond.)

No, the important thing is that we love Puffy, and Puffy loves us, with every cell in his little birdlike body. He’s a special cat, and in another home he might run the risk of being overlooked and underappreciated. We might laugh at him, but he doesn’t mind. He’s all about making us happy.

We are glad to return the favor.

Got here from a Link or Search?
There’s more to The Way of Cats than the article you are reading now. See my LATEST CAT ADVICE.

Bond. James Bond.

Last modified on 2008-04-18 23:05:29 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Mr. Bond is a Norwegian Forest Cat mix. Caution is his middle name.

I got him in the first place because he was so shy and careful about new things. He was one of a litter dumped in a cardboard box at a pet store I used to frequent. The pet store put the kittens in a cage by the cash register in an attempt to get new homes for them. Three cats went quickly. But not this kitten, who was there day after day, squashed into a corner of the cage, eyes wide in fright. “No one can cuddle him,” I was told. So, nobody wanted him.

I thought he was only semi-feral, judging by the quick acceptance of his littermates. So I took him out, calmed his struggles, and convinced him, with slow blinks of my eyes, that I was his friend. I triumphantly took him back to the cashier to show how cuddly he could be. But when I tried to transfer him to the teenager’s arms, I realized I had tripped him, all right. He was sweet and cuddly. But, as it turned out, only with me. I had touched his Only Cat heart, and so I had to take him home.

Mr. Bond is our Supervisor, Main Spokescat, and Master of Scheduling. If I tell him it’s Daylight Savings Time, he won’t wake me for breakfast without considering the hour difference. When I overslept after studying for an important final, he was the hero of the day. Unable to get me up, he went into the living room, where Dear Husband was sleeping on the couch to give me room to study, and woke him up instead, by crackling a plastic bag, and then doing a “Lassie move” by getting Dear Husband to follow him into the bedroom, where I was awakened by the dread words, “What are you still doing here?” But, thanks to Mr. Bond, I made it to school in time to take the test.

Mr. Bond’s high intelligence is part of his caution. I believe he is too good at imagining poor outcomes, and this makes him less assertive than he might be. It is typical of Mr. Bond that the human dangling the wand toy for him will give up before Mr. Bond, hiding behind a piece of furniture, has completed his cunning plan for ambush. In fact, we suspect Mr. Bond enjoys the planning more than the actual ambush.

Besides being an intellectual, Mr. Bond has dramatic ambitions, since he will let me know he’s feeling neglected by hanging back in the hallway when it’s time for bed, wailing and lurking, until I make an equal fuss about missing him and he agrees to come to bed and take up his “teddy bear” position against my chest.

Unless he is trying out new hiding places, Mr. Bond is usually either curled up in my chair or against my leg. Either way, he’s a devoted companion, ready to be part of whatever I’m doing. Even if he is at a safe distance.

Got here from a Link or Search?
There’s more to The Way of Cats than the article you are reading now. See my LATEST CAT ADVICE.

Reverend Jim, the Goofball

Last modified on 2008-07-31 22:27:05 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Reverend Jim, aka RJ, is our kitten. He’s just a year old now, but since he looks and acts so much Maine Coon, the largest domestic cat, I’m confident he will be our kitten for three more years. They are slow to come to full maturity.

In RJ’s case, it can seem considerably longer. But it’s not his fault. He was being held as evidence in a police case, having bounced around various shelters for most of his four months, for what we can only assume was extreme neglect, since the only way I could tell he was a long-haired cat was the tufts in his ears.

He had reached out through his cage bars and patted me on the face, and I got to work, calling the police department and getting the officer in charge of the case to spring him. Twenty four hours later he was on his way home, an hour away on rural roads. He quieted down almost instantly, until the deworming medicine hit halfway there and now he had a serious complaint. I heard him search in vain for the litter box in the backseat, where I had secured his carrier. Even as I rolled down the windows, I thought that at least he cared about his litter.

The detritus was at one end, the kitten was at the other, I saw in the rearview mirror. So that was okay, the carrier had a washable bottom. We were ten minutes from home and I was still glad I didn’t get any on the mesh inside.

That’s when a deer jumped out in front of me, and while no one was in danger by the end of it, the poor kitten had been rolled around in his carrier.

Naturally, as I carried him up the stairs, all three neighbors on the second floor wanted to meet him, moving forward before I could warn them, their big smiles turning into looks of horror.

Then the kitten and the carrier had to go in the tub and be washed. By the time all this was done, and the kitten was rolled into a towel, RJ could be forgiven for thinking he had been chosen for one of those early New Age rebirthing experiments.

Dear Husband, whose illness makes for an erratic sleep schedule, had woken up, so I carried the kitten in. He marched his damp self right across the bed and put his face on Dear’s Husband’s face.

He’s had our hearts ever since. We taught him to play with toys, and he devoted himself to catching up on all the development he had missed. For months, he would select a Toy of the Day, and play with it in every possible way. His face took a long while to show expression unless there were extreme circumstances, such as the way his little face lit up when he saw the food bowl we had set out for him.

One thing I was, and remain, amazed by is that he may not have gotten enough food, attention, or toys in his early life, yet he never had difficulty with socialization. He is cuddly, sociable, and so eager to make friends he will moderate his behavior to get along with Puffy, and indulge his hero worship of James Bond. Mr. Bond has come to admit that there is fun in having a minion. RJ is a Beta, like Mr. Bond, so he is eager to help with the supervisory duties that these kinds of cats excel at.

So I picked him, this bony, ratlike, unkitten kitten, over all the tiny fluffy ones at the shelter. I didn’t do it because he was the least likely kitten to be adopted, though he was. I did it because it was obvious he had a great big muffiny heart.

All else is commentary.

Got here from a Link or Search?
There’s more to The Way of Cats than the article you are reading now. See my LATEST CAT ADVICE.