Bob's Good Idea

Bob, the Cat-Boy-in-the-Hood who has chosen to live with us, occasionally finds his new home boring. With his usual creativity, he has found a good solution—good, at least, for him!

This April, the weather has been erratic, with warm spells, followed by really chilly cold spells. We’re glad to see the rain, because we need it, and I’m glad to see the cold, because it suppresses the neighbors and quiets the place down a little.

Anyhow, Bob has a pretty good routine devised. He cruises, hunting for moles and mice as he always has, using our house as a convenient pit stop for crunchies, and for shelter when it rains, snows, blows or is otherwise inclement. This works well for him, even at night, because we are retired and also because we are old, which means one or the other of us is awake and always ready to play doorman for him.

When the weather is really bad, however, he may be stuck inside for 10-12 hours which soon becomes intolerable. Things then become intolerable for our other three gentle, completely domesticated felines who are kept indoors most of the time. To liven things up, Bob will try to play with them, and like a lot of tough street cats, his idea of fun is not the same as theirs. He plays rough, and although I don’t think he really means to hurt them, they clearly do not like it.

Well, around 2 a.m. on a night when I was up reading, it started to rain. So, I opened the door as usual and there he was, waiting to come in. After giving him the usual quick stroke on the head, I went back upstairs and climbed into bed, because rain on the roof is a wonderful sleeping potion for me. No sooner had I settled down, then the noise began. It was kitty thunder footing, and if you have more than one cat, you know what I mean. Amazing how much noise those dainty little feet can make, especially in a herd! I figured Bob was just blowing off steam, so I ignored it. With the lovely rain drumming, I soon went back to sleep.

The next day I came downstairs and at once realized that this had not been a good choice. In the middle of the living room lay a headless mouse. I realized Bob must have smuggled in some "entertainment."
Sure enough, a few nights later the process repeated. I tried to check his mouth. He easily evaded me, and trotted off into the dining room. The other cats—for once—followed. There he dropped his mouse, and then sat back with a feline smile. The others approached, quivering with excitement. Rarely do they get such a thrill!

The poor mouse took one look and made a run for it, and a melee followed as the indoor cats took after it. Bob licked his paw, apparently well pleased with himself. It suddenly came to me that we now had a mouse inside—perhaps crippled—which would obtain a small revenge by dying far back under my ten-ton entertainment center. After hanging around for some time, following the stampede hither and thither, I realized there was not much I could do to either help the mouse or hinder the cats. In the end, I decided there was nothing to do but go back to bed.

Cat Names

Cat Names and how they get them is a long and tortuous topic, as twisted and lumpy as old street cat’s busted tail. The “owner” (or, more properly, the feline “host”) gives kitty a name, but as Paul Gallico told us long ago in his wonderful and heartbreaking story, The Abandoned, kitties arrive with their own names, secret names that only cats know.

It is my theory that the secret name leaks into the susceptible mind of the cat “owner” and causes a kind of sea change to occur. The original “given” name becomes something else, it transmutes, sometimes taking along the elements of the by-human-bestowed name, sometimes not. I gave the name “Pamina” to a small flame-point domestic shorthair barn-born kitten, during my extended period of Mozart Madness. This promptly morphed into “Mina,” which became in turn became “Meena,” “Meena-Moo,” and finally just “Moo.” At the same time, we had another barn baby who made a perfect imitation of a Maine Coon, old-fashioned black and gray. As if Mozart wasn’t sufficiently entertaining, I was also reading a lot of ETA Hoffmann, one of the 18th Century inventors of the Fantasy novel. This darling round kitten became “Murr,” after Hoffmann’s own beloved feline companion. (It means “purr” in German.)
Typical of human skill in naming, this large cuddly ball with toe feathers and a fluffy buff belly, did not purr at all. He had that gorgeous round Maine Coon face, with neck ruff and ear feathers, so he became “Murr Face.” After awhile—and you can see this coming—it just became “Face,” or, when we wished to address him formally: “Face Cat.”

I’m not saying there is anything wrong with “Mittens” or “Boots,” nor even “Fluffy,” although I think these cats, too, have secret names, ones their owners may never discover. I once read in a new age magazine that cats prefer names which have initial sounds of “S,” “T,” “F,” “B,” “M” and “P.” On the strength of this (perhaps) dubious authority, I followed the rule for many years in giving cat names. We had “Set” and “Tut” strictly following the Egyptian theme. We had Bast the Beautiful, a ferocious black female who chased squirrels up trees, caught them and then rode them down to their deaths. We had “Sam,” a Siamese, of course, but of the apple-headed big bodied variety. His full name was “Mahasamatman” after the Buddha.

Some nice folks in Nashville let us take over Sam’s care, as he’d moved over to our house anyway. Fact was, they’d picked him up behind a Mexican restaurant in Phoenix. He loved those dinners we had in the eighties: corn chips covered with chili and cheese. You could make Sam a plate starting with the chip, bean and burger layer, then top it with salsa, sour cream and guacamole, and he’d motor through it, right down to the bottom.

There’s an old adage about every life “Needs 9 cats.” You need at least nine, IMHO, because every cat is a stand-out individual. The older I get, and the more I learn about them, the better my feline relationships become. As the all-powerful aliens said on an ancient Star Trek “They are beings; they have spirit.”
–Juliet Waldron
http://www.mozartswife.com/