Owning a Cat is an Oxymoron

“Once was a time, in New York's jungle in a tree, before I went into the world in search of other kinds of love, nobody owned me but a cat named Sloopy.” – Rod McKuen, “A Cat Named Sloopy”

The first pet my wife and I ever owned as a married couple was a cat named Gremlin. Actually, his full name was Gremlin Meshugina Kittums. (For those of you not fluent in Yiddish, “Meshugina” means crazy.) With only two breaks, we have always been owned by at least one cat. Notice I said that we have been owned by cats. I first encountered that concept in Rod McKuen’s poem quoted above. (By the way, the full text can be found here: http://www.why-not.com/cats/sloopy.htm and on his album “At Carnegie Hall.”) But until I finally lived with a cat, I never really understood it. You may buy or acquire a cat by other means but it is the cat that chooses who it will own. An axiom is that “Dogs have owners; cats have staff.” And once you accept the fact that you are a life support system for the cat that owns you, you have truly understood life with a cat.

I came to be a cat person quite accidentally. The extent of my pets while growing up was a couple of turtles and a couple of goldfish. We lived in an apartment house and the excuse was always we didn’t have the room. I was also aware that my parents actively disliked cats. I recall my mother disparaging them and my father once kicking one at my uncle’s house that sprang out of nowhere to attack his foot. My fraternity decided to adopt a stray named Ralph with only two dissenting votes, mine being one of them. As the medical bills piled up, those two dissenting votes proved to be prescient.

So, it came as a bit of a surprise, when we acquired Gremlin that he became a source of unending amusement. He had two favorite activities. The first involved the cocker spaniel we also acquired. He would lay in a chair in the living room. When the spaniel walked past, he would leap, wrap his fore paws around her hind paws, tackle her, then bolt. The second was the result of the apartment’s architecture and shag carpet of the 70s. It was a two-floor apartment and the steps were open with no risers and were carpeted. Gremlin would latch onto the carpeting and climb up the underside of the steps, emerging through the one at the top, run down and start the process again. Unfortunately, when we moved from California, we had to leave him behind.

Our daughter Sara’s first cat was a gray long-haired female kitten that we named Kitty because that was a word she could say at the time. Kitty was one of the few we ever bought. She was also one of the sweetest cats we ever had. We have pictures of Sara carrying her by holding her around the neck. The poor animal’s eyes are bugging out and her tongue is hanging out but she never once scratched her. She was also the first cat that took ownership of me. I didn’t recognize it as such because it was an unfamiliar concept, despite having known McKuen’s poem for years. She would wait until I was sitting in a comfy chair or on the couch and drape herself over my shoulders, purring happily. She may have been Sara’s cat but I was her person.

Kitty had died not too long after we moved in with my in-laws while I went to grad school. My in-laws had a black, long-hair named Itsy-Bitsy whose name was shortened to Bitsy because it was easier for Sara to say as a toddler. It amused me that Bitsy seemed to be wherever I was. I still did not understand the concept of being owned by a cat. After we moved to West Virginia, we were without a cat because our landlord would not allow us to have any pets. But whenever we came home, there was Bitsy, attaching herself to me wherever I was. It was a source of never-ending wonder and surprise because I still did not picture myself as a cat person.

When we returned from WV, one of our first acquisitions was a condo and a Himalayan female that we named Kaitu (Like the Himalayan mountain, K-2… get it?). For whatever reason, she took an active dislike to Joy. She didn’t last long and she never really fit in.

There followed several less memorable cats and then came NoNuts. NoNuts was a fairly good-sized buff-colored longhair male who my mother-in-law had acquired. She never really seemed to settle on a name for him alternately calling him Buffy, Tuffy, Scruffy, Muffy or names of a similar sound. They decided to have him neutered and dropped him at the vet the day they were leaving for Florida for the winter. They told us to pick him up and keep him for the winter and they’d take him back when they came back north. As a joke, we started calling him NoNuts, for obvious reasons. By the time they returned from Florida, he only answered to that name and he would not let them anywhere near him. so NoNuts became our cat, one of the very few males we ever owned.

NoNuts was a tough guy who preferred spending time outside but he also took ownership of Joy and was devoted to her. When we moved to a new house, he went out one day and never came home. We were devastated because we had lost three other cats in a similar manner shortly before that. When we were finally able to sell our old house, the night before the closing, we did a walk-through. From the back yard I heard a cat crying. I opened the door and in walked the scrawniest, filthiest, skinniest version of NoNuts you can imagine, with one paw stuck through his flea collar. He had gone out that day and gone where he thought home was. He had lost about half of his weight and had existed by eating the small frogs around the swimming pool. About a thousand dollars in vet bills later, he had become the golden cat. But he was home with us. He stayed with us until he was over nineteen years old, apparently healthy right up to the point where he was suddenly unable to care for himself. We let him go and allowed him to be put down because it was his time. We, especially my wife still miss him.

To me, the gold standard in cats was Butter. We adopted her from the vet. She was a long-haired gray kitten. On our way home in the car, she lay like a lump in my wife’s lap. As soon as we got her into the house, she ran for the darkest corner of the kitchen and would not come out. We left her alone and put out a dish with food and water. Eventually she came out. We were unsure of what to name her but I settled on Feather. That was until she got comfortable around us. She was one of those cats who would repeatedly and strongly butt her head against your hand until you pet her. Thus, the name Butter. The week we got her, my wife had to suddenly go to Florida because her mother was hospitalized. She was gone for almost a month. In that time, Butter started sleeping next to me and attached herself to (well, took ownership of) me. She would drape herself over the computer monitor when I was sitting at the computer and would let one paw hang down in front of the screen. Sometimes, she would crawl into my lap and refuse to leave while I sat at the keyboard. She was one of the cats that went out one day and never came home. I still miss her.

We had three cats that came from one litter: Pyscho, a long-haired black, female, Tribble, a tuxedo-colored short-haired male and Trouble, an almost identical slightly smaller female. Psycho was laid-back and gentle once she grew up. She earned her name as a kitten by climbing the drapes and walking along the curtain rod and by laying on the top edge of a doorway to the half-bath off the family room. Trouble and Tribble wound up being renamed Baby Boy and Baby Girl because we kept mixing up their names. They were just sweet cats. Psycho was also unique in that she was allergic to her own cat dander and had a constantly runny nose. All three of them, at various times, went out and never came home.

After Butter disappeared, we adopted another long-haired gray female I named Suvwi, the Klingon word for “warrior.” When we got her she was a tiny kitten but she faced down my mother-in-law’s French poodle. Okay, the poodle wasn’t very large but he towered over her and she stood her ground. She quickly took ownership of me and was another who would sit in my lap while I was at the computer. I had decided, by then, that the cats were no longer going to be allowed to be outside cats. We had lost too many already.

Sara had a couple of cats that she raised as kittens, April and Trinity. She brought them with her when she moved back in with us for a while. April is a long-haired female calico tabby who is dumb. If T.S. Eliot had written about her in Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, she would be April, the cat of the Short Bus. Trinity was a gray long-haired Tabby. Sadly, she lost her tail due to a wound and something went wrong inside her and she could not eat. In mercy, we had her put to sleep. April is still with us. Her favorite thing is to pull a pair of socks out of my drawer, carry them downstairs in her mouth, then yowl as if she has had a kitten. Like I said, April’s not too bright. In fact, she’s as dumb as a dog.

A friend of Sara’s had a tiny short-haired white female with colored spots around her ears and a calico striped tail. Her name was Rascal or Cally for short. The friend’s younger child turned out to be allergic to cats so Sara brought her home to us. She was tiny, even by small cat standards and we quickly renamed her Little Bit. For the longest time, we could not figure out why Suvwi was constantly beating her up. When Suvwi disappeared, Little Bit was suddenly attached to me. Then it became clear. Suvwi had been guarding her turf and her ownership of me from Little Bit. Now that Suvwi was gone, Little Bit owned me 100%. I have never had a cat as devoted as she is to me. If she had her way, she would be touching me 24/7, 365 days a year. She literally follows me around the house when I get up to do something. If she is awake and I’m home, she is wherever I am. And she’s still tiny. And neither Little Bit nor April are allowed to go outside. At all!

I have long said I will never own another dog with the possible exception of if I was ever to need a seeing-eye dog. But I will never be without a cat. I am a cat person, lock, stock and barrel and will always be. Who knows, maybe I WAS a cat in a past life.