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Reigning cats and dogs
IT IS SAID that there are two types of people: dog people and cat people. I suppose there are also “no-pet-at-all” people, but we don’t talk about them.
I have always considered myself a dog person. I respect cats; their independence, their “my-way-or-the-highway” attitude. But there’s something so loving about a dog - especially one as special as Mr. Darcy - that I can’t even pretend to prefer cats.
There was a time in my life, though, when I was indundated – even controlled – by cats.
Shortly after my wife and I got together, my father persuaded me to take one of the kittens his neighbour’s cat was producing. Reluctantly, I agreed but when the time for delivery came and went with no sign of our cat, I was nudged into accepting a kitten from someone at work.
Of course, on the very day that that kitten arrived, my father’s neighbour’s cat arrived and we became a two-kitten household.
I was reading The Maltese Falcon at the time, so the black male cat became Sam Spade and the tortoise-shell female his girlfriend Bridget O’Shaughnessy (Bo).
Cats are really just pieces of furniture that move around occasionally. They have to be fed and their litter has to be changed, but they really are easy to ignore.
On one particular day, it wasn’t easy to ignore them. This was our wedding day and the plan was that we were going to go home after the ceremony and a big party, feed the cats, then go down to the hotel to spend the night before heading off on our honeymoon the next morning.
When we got home, we discovered the balcony door was open; the screen door was broken and the cats had disappeared. We lived on the ground floor but neither cat had ever been outside before.
We spent our wedding night looking for the cats. By midnight, we were fighting; by three a.m. we weren’t talking to each other; by five we wanted this damned thing annulled.
SAM SPADE actually did appear just as daylight broke, but Bo was nowhere to be found.
We cancelled the night at the hotel; we cancelled the honeymoon and we settled into a week of hell.
I thought I had found her at the Humane Society, but when I brought her outside to the car, my wife said “that’s not her” and I had to bring the poor confused creature back inside.
I was on the radio; we put posters up throughout the neighbourhood; we got a call from a feline bounty hunter after midnight one night asking if any of the twelve or so cats in his car was the one we were missing.
My cousin owned a pet store at the time and she produced a replacement cat for us; a grey and white polydactyl little thing that slept in my wife’s hair on its second or third night with us meaning that we could never get rid of it. Because he had so many extra toes on each paw, we called him Mickey. Not Mickey Mouse, whom I suppose he resembled, but Mickey Katz who was a band leader in the forties (and the father of Joel Grey).
Five days after beginning her odyssey, Bo came home. No fanfare, no announcement, just a mewing at the door while we were eating breakfast.
Bo never really accepted Mickey’s presence in “her” house – they never really got along - but we had three cats from that day for at least another fifteen years.
And the marriage? It survived the trauma of its beginning and turned into the two happiest years of my life.
Sadly, we spread those two years over 18 years. But that’s another story . . .
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