Sarah was 7, Daniel had just turned 4. We had been in our big house on High Point Lane, way out in the country outside Columbia, Missouri, for just a few months. We decided it was time to get some pets. We decided on a couple of cats; one for each child. We weren’t ready for a dog; a dog would be too much like a third child; cats were more independent. We went to the local shelter and allowed each child to choose their own cat. Daniel chose a big, good-natured, black animal. Sarah chose a tiny, terrified ball of fur, huddling in the back of its cage. We let each child name their cat. Daniel named his cat Blackie, appropriately enough. Sarah named hers Fluffy.
Fluffy had obviously been through a lot of trauma before he ended up with us. He was about 6 months old, emaciated, flea-bitten, and plainly freaked out. The shelter said they had found him wandering the streets. When we brought him home he headed immediately for the nearest piece of furniture and scurried underneath. And there he stayed for the next three days.
Sarah was upset that her cat wouldn’t come out and play with her. But she was determined to make friends with it. She sat beside whatever piece of furniture Fluffy was hiding under, and talked to her new cat. She told him he was safe now and that he had nothing to fear. Eventually Fluffy came out.
It didn’t take him long to become part of our family. It also didn’t take us long to realize that we had adopted one weird cat. Fluffy was noisy. He had a lot to tell us, and he didn’t hold back. Fluffy shed. Oh my, how he shed. Great clouds of fur were left in his tracks wherever he went. We bought a cat brush and started brushing him daily, but it was never enough. We could have made a dozen fur coats from that animal, easy.
Fluffy also had lingering signs of the trauma he had experienced as a kitten. It took him a long time to decide that he had a reliable source of food. He was a thief. He stole food, but didn’t eat it. He stored it in the back of Sarah’s closet, for a rainy day, I suppose. Periodically we would have to remove loaves of bread, Hostess Twinkies, and the occasional slice of pizza from her closet.
When Fluffy was still very young we bought him a scratching post that had one of those springy wire things attached to it with a ball of fuzzy stuff on top. Somehow he managed to inhale part of that fuzzy ball. This caused an infection that led to pneumonia. He survived, but until the end of his days, he sneezed. And sneezed….and sneezed. He never learned to blow his nose, either. We lived with cat snot, which is nasty stuff, believe me! We tried different medications, but nothing really helped.
Blackie was eaten by a coyote after about a year or so with us, but we got Daniel another cat after awhile. This one was named Felix and he and Fluffy became a hunting-team.
Fluffy wasn’t the biggest, baddest cat-hunter I had ever owned, but he did well. He cleaned up the snakes in the basement. He brought us presents of mice, moles and voles, and the occasional bird or baby rabbit. And sometimes those cats decided to go after bigger prey. One night Lee and I heard something making a horrible racket below our bedroom window. We peered outside and there were our two cats, circling their prey – a fox! The fox was making an indignant noise, something between a bark and a howl. The cats just kept circling. I think we finally threw something at them to end the circus.
We had a problem with deer coming right up to the house and eating all of our flowers and vegetables. The deer were pests but there wasn’t much we could do about them. Felix tried to take one once. He stalked it and cornered it in our flower bed. The thing that was funny was that deer always act like prey and run away, but this deer looked at that cat like “you’ve got to be kidding!”, stamped his foot, and wouldn’t budge. That animal was a little too much for Fluffy. I think even he thought Felix had taken on more than he could chew that time. Fluffy eventually got beaten up by a raccoon, and after that I wouldn’t let the cats out at night.
At one point Daniel owned a couple of newts in an aquarium, and Sarah acquired two hamsters. The hamsters and newts should have been Fluffy’s natural prey, but somehow he knew that these animals were family and he treated them as such. We saw the cat fur on the curtains by the newt aquarium and knew that Fluffy had been checking out the newts. Occasionally the hamsters would get out of their cage and disappear in our house. Fluffy would find them for us, but not hurt them. He’d just show us where they were hiding.
Felix got cancer, and died. Fluffy was lonely and we decided it was time to get a dog. Marley came to live with us when Daniel was a sophomore in high school. Now normally dogs were Fluffy’s nemesis. He hated and feared all dogs, but not Marley. Marley was family and Fluffy knew that right away. Marley and Fluffy napped together, played together, groomed each other. They loved each other, although it was hard to say which animal was the dominant one. They both had their areas. Marley wouldn’t let Fluffy come upstairs sometimes. Marley never went down into the basement, which was Fluffy’s kingdom. But it worked out, until Marley was hit by a car, and then once again Fluffy had no animal friends to play with.
When Fluffy was almost 15 years old, we started planning our move to Austin, Texas. We knew we would have to drug him to travel all that way in a car, unless we wanted to go insane from constant meowing. We gave him tranquilizers, and they worked pretty well. He only meowed half as much as usual.
Fluffy adapted very well to Texas. He was getting old. He liked having me around all the time, since I was telecommuting back to my job in Missouri, and working from home. He loved going out on our unbearably hot deck and soaking up that Texas sun. But when we found out we were moving to Hong Kong, we knew Fluffy would never survive that long of a flight.
Fortunately our house-sitter Karin agreed to take care of Fluffy. We tried to warn her about all of his peculiarities – the meowing, the shedding, the sneezing, but she only said “oh I love animals”. Little did she know…after a month or so with Fluffy she admitted that he was more of a challenge than she had expected. Still, he wormed his way into her heart just like he did with everyone (except maybe Lee).
When Fluffy died in his sleep several weeks ago Karin dreaded having to tell us our cat was gone. But, it was okay. I was so grateful that he went peacefully and Karin didn’t have to make a difficult decision to put him to sleep. He was almost 18 years old.
Fluffy had a good life. He was the strangest animal I’ve ever owned, and certainly the longest-lived. Part of me wishes I could get another cat right now, but it’s simply not practical as long as we live in Asia. In the meantime I’ll have to pet other people’s dogs and cats I guess!
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