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.