The Way of Cats

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.

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