Historical February 1998 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
This is a cat’s report. I’m no Garfield, no cartoon mouser. I’m a serious, humorless cat with a few points to make before I leave this world. Unfortunately, Jane is my only ghost writer option, my brother “Pinky” to edit with the mouse. I’ve had to get her cracking on this.
It would just be too strenuous for me to tackle alone. (Matter of fact, I’m sleeping while she writes it. That was our arrangement). At 16 (or so) and not counting anybody’s “9 lives” theories, I am in peopleyears an old timer.
In cat years, I’m cooked. I’ve given up fur cleaning and any semblance of “playing with cat toys” (behaviors we cats do to please our humans, who keep spending purrfectly good tuna fish money for fake mice with bells, sticks with feathers, and plastic tires with balls you can’t get out rolling around in them). That’s too much effort as I round the bend of life, period.
I do occasionally still climb the woodpile in my back yard, wobble along the top of the fence, drop to the dumpster and the alley beyond.
There is one spot I still claim in the yard next door where I need to go see and be seen, but that’s it. Its the food bowl, the rug in front of the radiator and a down pillow for me as long as thyroid pills keep me going. There’s not much time to get my messages across.
I moved to 6100 Washington from the Humane Society in the Dark Ages after my first “owners” had given me a good Catholic name and taught me to do a nice cartwheel at the sound of it, and then, voila, they had a baby and decided I had to go. That’s all the “reasons” (for dumping me) they gave, just “new baby”. (At least my brother cat, “Itty’s” information at the ASPCA said, “Lived life in barn, catches mice. Likes people and Purina. Can’t afford.” Hearts can go out for a cat with such a message.) I was left with a bad reputation, frankly, as a baby’s breath sucker or something, and I tell you I don’t know any cat who ever was a baby’s breath sucker. (I would like to hear from anyway who’s known a baby’s breath sucker. I’ll report it, rest assured.) Anyway my clock suddenly frighteningly ticking.
I had to get a compelling telepathic cat message to Jane one Sunday — “browse at the Humane Society.” and when she came, I had to answer to my name and do a cartwheel at her feet (when all I wanted to do was to continue desperately yowling in protest that I didn’t deserve to be there).
Then I had to ride quietly in her car (a car having driven me to this horrific situation).
Then I had to assess 6100 Washington as a place worth staying, quick make friends with cats already in residence lest I be judged disruptive, all just to get to the point where I could safely sit on the garage roof, a dizzying fete of my youth I don’t even wake up to consider doing anymore. So, cat’s message to readers today is, “It’s from h_ _ _ needing a home under the best of circumstances. Think of cats in alleys with no reputation at all and no telepathic success.”
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, February 1998.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1998_02.pdf, printed page(s) 6; PDF page(s) 6.
