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Pidget (happy wonder cat full of love, and protector of the homefront from all enemies domestic and foreign _and_ squirrels) is trying to let me know she wants to go out. I know that because she has food, and she keeps coming over to the computer to be petted in short spurts. If pressed, she will bat my leg with a paw.
Young her majesty made a loud noise the other day when my face was in Pidget's belly fur (almost entirely accidental, although there is a certain amount of sibling rivalry there) and she only slightly scratched my face, which is not an easy thing when you have that many toes. Pidget is a Hemingway cat. She walks kind of like the old fashioned kind of body builder who doesn't work the extensors and is just a tiny bit permanently hunched over. If she were human, she would look as if she were about to make a fist all the time, which is deceptive.
When Pyewacket died, I wasn't ready for another cat right away. We had been together for twelve of her thirteen years. I was extravagantly sad for quite a while. We buried her at the top of a hill on mom's property, overlooking a wetlands bird sanctuary, with her pet teddy bear, whose tummy she used to knead when she was upset. John covered her with rocks before he filled in the hole to discourage coyotes.
I didn't think her majesty was paying as much attention as she was (we were both kind of new at the parenting thing, she and I) and I had the idea that you didn't explain things until they asked so you wouldn't tell them more than they were ready to process. This was almost never a safe bet with my young friend, who almost always knew more than she let on, although she lots of times didn't let me know right away, because she didn't want to tell me more than I could process.
Anyway, the weekend after we buried Pye, her majesty got sick. Really sick, for the first time (at around six months), with a 107 temperature. The doctor told us that we needed to put her in cool water to keep her temperature down, and to give her infant tylenol suspension (did you know that regular infant's tylenol has saccharin in it? Anyway, she wouldn't take it). She said that all a hospital would do was the same thing, only I wouldn't be allowed to hold her and she'd be exposed to other things.
I sat up in the bathtub all night. I suppose I must have slept - I know I took a few breaks to use the toilet and have some coffee - but from six at night until seven or so the next morning we sat, she and I, in a bathtub full of cold water under an open window, she on my tummy so she wouldn't get too cold and me - well, me quite a bit too cold, but with one arm hooked under her chin so that if I fell asleep, which I'll admit seemed sort of unlikely to me, under the circumstances, she wouldn't be able to slide off under the water.
By the morning, her fever had broken, and she seemed much more comfortable. We settled in together, she and I, to watch wubb wubbs (our first really popular video was "Sesame Street Rock and Roll," which contained the Monster in the Mirror (Wubba Wubba) Song. We used to show her the baby in the mirror whenever we went to a new place so she'd already know someone there. I guess she figured Grover's mom and dad did too. Videos were wubb wubbs in our house). We were chatting, which is to say that I was chatting, and she was being, attentively, six months old or so.
She wasn't talking yet, really, and she didn't for some months afterward, but that morning she looked at me and said "Mommy, I ow. Baby go bye bye?" (me, shocked out of my wits - not too far, that, on that particular morning) No! No. No, of course not. Where did you get an idea like that? No, you're not going anywhere. You're staying right here with us. Mommy and daddy and baby are staying together. Baby is staying right here, and mommy is staying right here, and daddy is staying right here. Everyone is staying right here. Baby's not going, mommy's not going, daddy's...
By that time she wasn't listening any more. I think she got her answer from the look on my face when I first said no, and the rest of it was just mommy TMI, to which (you may have noticed) mommy is prone. She relaxed, and her fever didn't go above 103 before it went away entirely. It spiked again the next night, but not by nearly as much.
So anyway, I had kind of a resistance to getting a new cat, but we decided that when a new cat found us the way Pyekitty did, we'd take it in. She walked in past me the day I moved into my apartment in North Carolina, and she left whenever I asked her to, which after a while I didn't have the heart to do any more. She used to follow me across a four lane highway to the convenience store to make sure I was coming back. She ate cheap cat food and ramen noodles for months. We were pretty tight.
So, when I got the email from Arthur (remember Tony, who I wrote about last week? Arthur was Tony's best friend, and they worked out a deal so he could work freelance as the head of traffic when he needed lots of money quickly - he didn't have a whole lot of incentive to get his job done on time, is what I'm getting at) saying he was going to put his cat to sleep if someone didn't adopt it, we adopted it.
Turns out, she wasn't quite as he described her. He wrote about a beloved family pet with all her shots frolicking in the woods at his weekend place. "Digitte" he called her, dripping with elephantine sentiment. Turns out, what we actually got was a seriously unhappy cat with none of her shots and with a badly healed broken rib from where he kicked her after she pissed on something to express her opinion of being locked in an airless New York studio by herself all day. She did that quite a bit, it seemed.
He used to ask me about her with a gleam in his eye pretty much every day until it became clear that she was perfectly well behaved, then he stopped asking. He figured he was giving me a violent cat, prone to urinating in the house, and he was visibly nettled that it didn't work out that way. Actually, he stopped asking after I innocently told him that urinating on your stuff is a mark of kitty contempt. Go figure.
She escaped almost immediately, out the bathroom window (we're on the second floor, but there's a picnic table under the window). She was away for three days. Every day, one of the guys went around the neighborhood with our young friend calling for her, and as she couldn't say "Digit" yet, she kept yelling for Pidget. One day she came back, and that was it.
She has: a very loud purr, a regular circuit of reconnaissance in the neighbors' yard, particularly now that the dog across the yard next door is gone, a series of fairly intricate signals for when she is to be let to go carry out any of her regular catly activities, and if I'm not the one who lets her in, she always makes a stop by the computer for a quick pet before she heads for her food.
She comes when smeerped for, except when she doesn't.
Taken all and all, an admirable cat to be owned by.
Young her majesty made a loud noise the other day when my face was in Pidget's belly fur (almost entirely accidental, although there is a certain amount of sibling rivalry there) and she only slightly scratched my face, which is not an easy thing when you have that many toes. Pidget is a Hemingway cat. She walks kind of like the old fashioned kind of body builder who doesn't work the extensors and is just a tiny bit permanently hunched over. If she were human, she would look as if she were about to make a fist all the time, which is deceptive.
When Pyewacket died, I wasn't ready for another cat right away. We had been together for twelve of her thirteen years. I was extravagantly sad for quite a while. We buried her at the top of a hill on mom's property, overlooking a wetlands bird sanctuary, with her pet teddy bear, whose tummy she used to knead when she was upset. John covered her with rocks before he filled in the hole to discourage coyotes.
I didn't think her majesty was paying as much attention as she was (we were both kind of new at the parenting thing, she and I) and I had the idea that you didn't explain things until they asked so you wouldn't tell them more than they were ready to process. This was almost never a safe bet with my young friend, who almost always knew more than she let on, although she lots of times didn't let me know right away, because she didn't want to tell me more than I could process.
Anyway, the weekend after we buried Pye, her majesty got sick. Really sick, for the first time (at around six months), with a 107 temperature. The doctor told us that we needed to put her in cool water to keep her temperature down, and to give her infant tylenol suspension (did you know that regular infant's tylenol has saccharin in it? Anyway, she wouldn't take it). She said that all a hospital would do was the same thing, only I wouldn't be allowed to hold her and she'd be exposed to other things.
I sat up in the bathtub all night. I suppose I must have slept - I know I took a few breaks to use the toilet and have some coffee - but from six at night until seven or so the next morning we sat, she and I, in a bathtub full of cold water under an open window, she on my tummy so she wouldn't get too cold and me - well, me quite a bit too cold, but with one arm hooked under her chin so that if I fell asleep, which I'll admit seemed sort of unlikely to me, under the circumstances, she wouldn't be able to slide off under the water.
By the morning, her fever had broken, and she seemed much more comfortable. We settled in together, she and I, to watch wubb wubbs (our first really popular video was "Sesame Street Rock and Roll," which contained the Monster in the Mirror (Wubba Wubba) Song. We used to show her the baby in the mirror whenever we went to a new place so she'd already know someone there. I guess she figured Grover's mom and dad did too. Videos were wubb wubbs in our house). We were chatting, which is to say that I was chatting, and she was being, attentively, six months old or so.
She wasn't talking yet, really, and she didn't for some months afterward, but that morning she looked at me and said "Mommy, I ow. Baby go bye bye?" (me, shocked out of my wits - not too far, that, on that particular morning) No! No. No, of course not. Where did you get an idea like that? No, you're not going anywhere. You're staying right here with us. Mommy and daddy and baby are staying together. Baby is staying right here, and mommy is staying right here, and daddy is staying right here. Everyone is staying right here. Baby's not going, mommy's not going, daddy's...
By that time she wasn't listening any more. I think she got her answer from the look on my face when I first said no, and the rest of it was just mommy TMI, to which (you may have noticed) mommy is prone. She relaxed, and her fever didn't go above 103 before it went away entirely. It spiked again the next night, but not by nearly as much.
So anyway, I had kind of a resistance to getting a new cat, but we decided that when a new cat found us the way Pyekitty did, we'd take it in. She walked in past me the day I moved into my apartment in North Carolina, and she left whenever I asked her to, which after a while I didn't have the heart to do any more. She used to follow me across a four lane highway to the convenience store to make sure I was coming back. She ate cheap cat food and ramen noodles for months. We were pretty tight.
So, when I got the email from Arthur (remember Tony, who I wrote about last week? Arthur was Tony's best friend, and they worked out a deal so he could work freelance as the head of traffic when he needed lots of money quickly - he didn't have a whole lot of incentive to get his job done on time, is what I'm getting at) saying he was going to put his cat to sleep if someone didn't adopt it, we adopted it.
Turns out, she wasn't quite as he described her. He wrote about a beloved family pet with all her shots frolicking in the woods at his weekend place. "Digitte" he called her, dripping with elephantine sentiment. Turns out, what we actually got was a seriously unhappy cat with none of her shots and with a badly healed broken rib from where he kicked her after she pissed on something to express her opinion of being locked in an airless New York studio by herself all day. She did that quite a bit, it seemed.
He used to ask me about her with a gleam in his eye pretty much every day until it became clear that she was perfectly well behaved, then he stopped asking. He figured he was giving me a violent cat, prone to urinating in the house, and he was visibly nettled that it didn't work out that way. Actually, he stopped asking after I innocently told him that urinating on your stuff is a mark of kitty contempt. Go figure.
She escaped almost immediately, out the bathroom window (we're on the second floor, but there's a picnic table under the window). She was away for three days. Every day, one of the guys went around the neighborhood with our young friend calling for her, and as she couldn't say "Digit" yet, she kept yelling for Pidget. One day she came back, and that was it.
She has: a very loud purr, a regular circuit of reconnaissance in the neighbors' yard, particularly now that the dog across the yard next door is gone, a series of fairly intricate signals for when she is to be let to go carry out any of her regular catly activities, and if I'm not the one who lets her in, she always makes a stop by the computer for a quick pet before she heads for her food.
She comes when smeerped for, except when she doesn't.
Taken all and all, an admirable cat to be owned by.
