.jpg)
Pop Goes The World
Late last year, the universe gifted Roma and me two very young cats in search of a home.
I am a firm believer in the cat distributions system – the belief that a cat will come into one’s life when the time is right. This happened to me over 40 years ago when a stray black cat showed up at my house the Christmas after my grandfather died. All of us were having such a hard time getting into the Christmas spirit because my grandfather loved the holiday so much. It felt selfish to celebrate without him.
Stepping out of my mom’s car one night after Christmas shopping, my cousin Jenny encountered a cat who immediately began twining around her legs. When the cat kept coming around, we gave him a name, Coodley, and when the weather turned dreadfully cold, we took him in. He lived until the ripe old age of 20.
One Saturday last November, the cat distribution system struck again.
Our neighbor walked across our backyard with a small cow-patterned cat in her arms. She knew that we had cats and wanted to know if this one was one of ours. We do not allow our cats outside so the answer was no. When the cat began hanging out on our front porch, we started feeding him and he slept sometimes in a cardboard Amazon box. I put an old bath rug inside the box so that he’d have something soft to sleep on.
Soon another cat made its presence known. This one was black with white markings, a classic tuxedo cat. The two cats seemed to know each other so we believed they were either littermates or at least from the same house. They were both very friendly and were almost aggressively affectionate. When I got home from work, they’d be waiting on the porch for me and would run to me when I got out of the car. They weren’t shy about getting into our vehicles. One weekend Roma had to go to the store and the tuxedo kitty jumped in the van with her. The cat accompanied her to Food Lion and sat in the car while she shopped, garnering some curious looks from people in the parking lot.
I was convinced that cats belonged to someone. Before we became too attached to them, I posted their pictures on my Facebook page hoping that the post would be shared and that someone would come forward to claim them. We thought that the owner of the tuxedo kitty picked him up one day. We caught the image of a man on our front porch on our Ring camera and heard him say, “Thank you, guys.” We didn’t see that cat for a while, but then he reappeared on our porch close to Thanksgiving. Turns out the man had seen the cat on our porch, and when he saw him while on a walk, he thought he was returning the cat to its owners.
Frigid weather set in after Thanksgiving and we began to wonder how we’d keep the cats warm. Roma bought an insulated and heated outdoor shelter for them, which they were reluctant to use at first, but they began sleeping in it when it was just too cold not to.
We started bringing them inside on a trial basis just to see how they would interact with the other cats. They still didn’t have names. Since they came to us as a pair, we thought of names of famous duos – Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Lewis and Clark, Ponch and John. We finally settled on Lenny and Squiggy, the two oddballs from the ‘70s sitcom “Laverne & Shirley,” a favorite TV show of ours from our childhood.
Once you’ve named a cat, it’s basically yours. And since no one had come forward to claim them, they were gradually assimilated into the existing pride of six. During the night we kept them in the basement in their own little cat cave. After a couple of weeks they were showing no signs of disease and we felt confident letting them mingle more often with the other cats.
Since being inside on a pretty much full-time basis, Squiggy has shown little interest in returning to the great outdoors, but Lenny still wants to wander. Shortly before Christmas, Lenny went out one night and disappeared into the darkness. When he didn’t come back after a couple of days, we thought for sure that he had been carried off by a coyote or hit by a car. Luckily he had been picked up by a neighbor down the road who posted his picture on a public Facebook page seeking his owner. We saw the post and he was returned to us two days before Christmas.
Now the two have fully ensconced themselves in our home. There are some occasional spats when the members of the old guard think the two new plebes are not showing enough respect or trying to get too chummy, but for the most part they are getting along. They have both had the surgery that have taken them out of the singles scene, have been cleared of any communicable diseases, and vaccinated.
Early Monday morning, Lenny got past Roma as she walked outside to start her car. For two hours there was no sign of him. As the sun rose, I thought I saw him in one of the trees. I called his name, but the white object in the tree didn’t move. I went inside and put on my glasses. When I looked at the tree again, I saw that the thing I thought was Lenny was actually a clump of frozen snow.
Lenny did come back shortly after 8 that morning. And I’m more nearsighted than I care to admit.
