I currently own four cats. The other pets on this page are ones I’ve had in the past.
Ezmerelda
Ezzy joined me in August, 2006. I took Cali and Pearl to the vet for their shots, and while I was waiting, one of the techs brought out a tiny tabby kitten. Of course I couldn’t resist, and had to hold her and give her my heart. The tech said that they had caught her in their live trap the night before last. She is a feral kitten, and they thought her mother must have been killed. They were looking for a home for her.
As I said in my blog post, they saw me coming.
They had already spayed her (!) and given her her shots and tests, which were all negative. So the little fur-ball came home with me. I named her Ezmerelda.
As my first feral cat, she has been quite a rewarding challenge. She took to Cali and Pearl right away, but was totally distrustful of people. She begged Cali Cat to cuddle with her for five days before Cali decided she would be “momma cat” again. They are still thick as thieves, and she and Pearl play a lot too.
I spent many hours talking to her and playing with her. After a few weeks she finally let me touch her, but only when she was sleepy. She loved my “sweet voice” and purred loudly. A few weeks later she stopped running from me whenever I came near, and finally, she started sleeping cuddled up next to me (with Cali Cat) and asked to be petted. She is now a full-fledged lap cat!
She is comfortable with me, but hides whenever anyone else comes in the house. I am sure that will always be the case.
She is a beautiful tabby cat, and I am convinced that she will soon challenge Cali’s role as dominant cat. She is very aggressive, especially during play – and always gets her way.
What a sweet wonderful little baby!
Pearl
Pearl joined us in April, 2005. Since I’d had to put two kitties and my dog PeeWee down over the last few years, I felt very ready for a new kitten. My friend Carol knew someone with free kittens, so I went over and picked her out. It was wonderful to have a kitten again!
After about a week, Cali Cat took Pearl on as her own kitten, having had kittens before I got her. She bathed her kitten, let her paux-suckle and taught her how to do all the important cat things like to remain aloof when the humans are talking to her.
Pearl is a very nice cat, but rather timid and stand-offish. She and Cali chase eachother through the house and wrestle daily. I guess she’s more of a “cat’s cat” than a people cat! The best thing is that Cali and Pearl
are madly in love with eachother and we enjoy perfect feline harmony.
Cali the Tortoiseshell Cat with the Calico Belly
Just before Memorial Day, 2003, I came home to a note in my mailbox from a friend. It said that someone had left a young cat with kittens on her doorstep. She took the kittens (old enough to be weaned) to a pet store, and wondered if I would take the mother cat. But of course! She told me that the little cat was a calico, so I named her Cali the Calico Cat before ever laying eyes on her.
Cali turned out to be tortoiseshell – not calico – but with a calico belly. So her full name is Cali the Tortoiseshell Cat with the Calico Belly. I just call her Cali Cat for short.
Cali Cat was tiny when I brought her home. She must have gotten pregnant during her first heat, poor little girl. She has a hearty appetite, and her weight doubled within two months. She took to my other two cats right away, although they took a little time to get used to her. Now she is the perfect playmate for my Voodoo Cat. They spend time each day posturing, slapping and wrestling. The extra activity has helped keep my ten year old in shape. Once in a while I even caught my Maggie Cat giving her chase.
Cali is extremely affectionate, and just loves to have her belly rubbed. Whenever I pet her she flops down and rolls over so that I will rub her belly. She starts purring the moment I touch her. She also loves to follow me around, running past me and leaping onto the furniture in whatever room I am going in to, then meowing for more attention. She loves to cuddle underneath the covers with me at night. She even “spoons” with me!
I am very thankful that Cali Cat came into my life.
Voodoo Cat
Voodoo Cat stole my heart in 1994 when I found him roaming the parking garage where I park my car at work. He was about 6 weeks old, and was meowing so loudly that I heard him 2 floors down. I took one look at him and knew it was meant to be. He put a love hex on me right then and there.
I had just read a story about Keith Richards finding a drowning kitten while the Stones were recording an album. He kept the cat and named it Voodoo, and he was the namesake for the Voodoo Lounge album. Hence my cat’s name.
Voodoo Cat must have been part fancy-cat. He had a pushed in face, very guttural meow, and the highest quality fur I have ever seen. He barely shed at all. He has huge round gold eyes and perfect tabby stripes. His personality was more like a dog than a cat: he greeted me at the door, followed me around the house, and drove me to distraction anytime I was doing something involving food. He was very determined and just wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was very affectionate, and loved to pump his paws on my chest like a nursing kitten when we cuddled.
He was my baby boy and I adored him. But during the summer of 2005 he started losing weight, becoming more lethargic, drinking more water and urinating more. For a while I thought it was because the weather had been very hot and humid that summer, and I don’t have air conditioning at home. I really thought he was just hot. But when the weather turned cooler and he kept losing weight, I took him to the vet.
Turned out he had diabetes. In fact he was diagnosed with diabetes while I was at my family reunion in Colorado. I told the Vet to go ahead and start him on insulin and special food. Since I, like you, know several people with diabetes who can control their disease, I figured the same would be true for Voo. But I guess they know very little about diabetes in cats, and even with the insulin and special food, he got worse and worse.
I finally had to say goodbye to him and have him put to sleep on November 9, 2005. Now he’s buried in my flower garden with Simba and Maggie. All three tabby cats are together, again.
Ruskus
Ruskus came to me via my brother. He got her from an animal shelter in Boulder, Colorado. I had her for twelve years. She was a wonderful cat, so much like my late Bambina cat that it is eerie – not only did she look like her, but she acted like her. She loved to jump up on my shoulder and give me hugs.
Ruskus was an extrordinary cat – near perfect, in fact. She was highly
intelligent, independent, and affectionate. She slept with me every night,
except during the summer months when she spent her nights outside and her
days sleeping. She was the perfect lap cat, able to spread her weight evenly
across my lap and not dig her claws in while I stroked her.
Her only flaw was a quick temper. She was always groomed immaculately, even though she spends a lot of time outside. She is the only cat I let outside to roam on her own, and she always comes back in one piece, until August 16th.
Ruskus disapeared from my house that day. I miss her very, very much.
I will never have another outside cat. It’s just too hard when they
disapear, and you never find out what happened to them. But Ruskus would
not have been happy as an indoor kitty. I will keep a little bubble of hope
floating inside my heart for a few years to come. I can’t walk past my back
door without looking out to see if she is there. I only hope that if she
did die, it was not painful.
PeeWee the Border Collie
When I was married, my husband wanted a puppy. I found this idea quite distasteful, seeing how dogs are the enemy of cats and all, but he insisted, so we got PeeWee, a Border Collie. I tried all her life to make PW understand that the cats are superior to her, but she never got it. To me, dogs were like the Odie character in the Garfield cartoon – drooling idiots – while cats are Gods. But I grew to love her anyway. When I became single again I thought about getting rid of her (she was only half-grown). But I didn’t, and for 14 years, I couldn’t imagine life without her.
She lived to be 14 years old, and had to be put to sleep in October of 2004. When she was younger, we went camping together every summer. She was my protector and confidant. Up until recently I would not have recommend Border
Collies as pets; they are very high strung, and really need to be out in the fields herding sheep or cattle to stay sane (no my cats won’t be herded). But an old Border Collie is the best dog in the world. They are extremely intelligent, loyal, and eager to please. I swear that sometimes we communicated telepathically. She was as much apart of me as is my right foot.
Maggie the Cat
It wasn’t very long after Bambina died that I got Maggie from a friend’s farm, where she wandered into a barn and couldn’t quite compete with the barn cats for food. She was about half-grown when I got her. Maggie’s goal in
life was to let no opportunity pass to rub my ankles. She was kind of slow and lumbering, but very affectionate and sweet. She lived to be 18 years old, and had to be put to sleep on March 4, 2005. She is buried out in my garden with Simba.
Simba
twins Millie and Simba
This was Simba. She was born in March of 1983 while I was a senior at MSU. My best friend Kelly had a cat named Sky – a beautiful long-haired tabby cat that looked a lot like a Maine Coon cat. When I met Kelly, Sky and Bambina were both kittens. We all became best buds.Since Sky was so beautiful, we decided, when the time came, to breed her. Well, a short-haired tabby tom cat who looked enough like Sky to be let into our house by mistake made our stud selection process much easier! Sky gave birth to 4 kittens while we were in Ft Lauderdale on spring break, and of course I had pick of the litter when we got back. Simba was the only one who turned out looking like her father – a round, short-haired tabby.
Simba was always quite timid, and my moving her all over the country when she was young didn’t help matters a bit. She was very shy and loved only me. She was also very affectionate and talkative. She was amazing for an 20 year old. She didn’t move around all that much, but she still demanded my attention. She had a good appetite up until the last two weeks of her life.
Simba is now buried in my perennial garden, and I visit her often. Dream well, Simba the Tiger Queen.
Simba at 20
Bambina
Bambina – the first true feline love of my life. I found her the summer before my junior year at MSU. My friend Brenda and I were strolling through the neighborhoods of East Lansing, looking for rooms for rent, following up on leads from the paper. I kept hearing a cat meowing in the distance. It grew louder and louder, more and more persistent. Soon we were changing direction intentionally to locate the cat. And then there she was, in someone’s front yard, a tiny cat stuck in a tiny tree, meowing so loudly that I had heard her 6 blocks away. I reached up and lifted her from the tree branch. She was about half-grown.
My but she was a lover! She instantly began purring, and rubbing against my face. I gave her a thorough petting, and then set her down on the ground. She continued purring and rubbing my ankles. We started walking, and she followed. I told the kitty to stay, but she wouldn’t listen, and followed us. A few houses down, a coed sunning herself in a lawn chair, looked up and said “Are you gonna take that cat? Cause the people in that house moved away and left her.”
GASP! Oh the horror! How could anyone do such an atrocious thing? Brenda said “Oh the poor Bambina!”
GASP! Oh the joy! I have a cat!
She followed us home. The name stuck.
Bambina was one of those rare brilliant cats with a ton of personality. She actually looked both ways before crossing the street. Obviously weaned too young, she loved to lick my face while we cuddled. She never outgrew her fear of heights, or her love of climbing. I rescued her from countless trees and rooftops over the years. This sentence eventually became an inside-joke between my housemates and I: “Cats on the roof, can’t get her down.”
I lost Bam twice in that first year. She would just wander off. The first time an Italian family answered my newspaperad. Bam had wandered into their son’s kindergarten classroom, way across town, and the boy had brought her home. The second time, she’d been gone two weeks, and I was on my way to class when I decided to duck into a jewelry store on Abbott. I had never gone in there before, and had no money, so I don’t know why I did it. But as soon as I got inside, I noticed a gray and white cat lying inside one of the glass jewelry cases there. I moved closer and closer.
“Bambina?”
“MEOW!!!!!!!”
The clerk said she had wandered in that morning. I missed class that day. Oft times she would spend the night elsewhere. Once a student in a house up the street was walking by and saw me with her in the front yard. “Is that your cat?” he said. I responded positively. “Wow I thought she was our cat! We’ve been feeding her for a month!”
Smart cat.
Once she came home with all of her white spots colored in with a black magic marker. I took months to wear off.
And then one day, during senior year, I came home from class to find her lying limp on the front porch. She was alive, but completely limp and very hot. I could see no injury. I didn’t have a car, and my housemate with a car wasn’t home, so I carried her in a box all the way across campus to the MSU Vet School – about an hours walk. They kept her there, and after a couple of days I got the phone call.
She had a disease I’d never heard of called Feline Leukemia.
This was 1983, and the disease was still so new that they didn’t even tell me it was contagious. Fortunately, my housemate’s cat and 4 kittens turned out to be naturally immune to it. I still have one of those kittens today.
Bam lived for 4 more years, mostly due to the generosity of my parents. The disease ruins the immune system, and so every time Bam would get in a fight or otherwise scraped up, she got infections and almost died. My folks never failed to send me the money I needed for the vet bills. Bam moved with me to grad schoolin upstate New York, to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Alameda, California, and finally to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she died of a massive infection that was just to severe to cure.
She was, indeed, one of the world’s greatest house cats.
Fluffy
This was my first cat, named Fluffy. I was 4 years old when she came to live with us, and it is my oldest memory. We had some friends over and as they were leaving, a little calico kitten rushed through the open door and straight to the kitchen, where she meowed for milk. My father, a staunchly non-cat person, was unable to resist my pleading. After checking with everyone in the neighborhood to find who she belonged to, I got to keep her.
Fluffy was a good cat. Once when I was a teenager she came home with some blood on her head and a cloudy eye. We took her to the vet and found that she had a bee bee inside her skull! Someone had shot her with a bee bee gun, and the pellet had just missed her brain, leaving her blind in one eye. We were very lucky, but I was still outraged. That started my life-longabomination of cruelty to animals.
Fluffy lived to be the ripe old age of 14, and had to be put to sleep while I was a freshman at Michigan State University. I went the rest of that year, and my entire sophomore year, cat-less. Well, only because no cats were allowed in the dorm.
