Grandpa the Cat: The Continuing Saga Continues
Hello. A break from news of death to news of life.
Bringing you up to date:
This is Grandpa, the stray cat we rescued from the street last summer. She’d been abandoned in a cat carrier in 90 degree heat. We gave Grandpa that name before the cat persuasively informed us of her actual gender about six weeks later, by squirting out three kittens. We didn’t change the name.
Right from the start, Grandpa was an irascible, suspicious, violent, hissing, scratching beast from Hades. She had the blood-drawing skill of a phlebotomist. She and her kittens lived in our heroically cluttered basement — they enhanced the clutter tenfold — while we tried to figure out what to do with them.
Grandpa, for all her foul temperament, was a good mom to her kits, keeping them clean, surrendering her food to them, correcting their behavior when needed and, mostly, protecting them from being shredded and eaten by us, the Enemy.
Some weeks ago we caught Grandpa in a feral-cat trap and took her to the Humane Rescue Alliance to get her spayed. The surgery was successful but the intended result was not: Grandpa remained a hideous, horrible presence, an instrument of torture and treachery at our feet.
The kits, though began to warm to us, a lot. Which Grandpa did not like.
And that’s where we last left you in this saga.
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The next thing that happened was that we noticed that Pittsburgh, one of the three kittens, was ineptly attempting to mount Canarsie, another of the three kittens, which is when we decided we HAD to get all of them to the Rescue Alliance, pronto. We did, trundled in one big crate. (How? We conspired to lock Grandpa out of the room and they obligingly piled in, pumped for an adventure.)
Afterwards, on that day, alone in the basement, Grandpa began to howl. Great, mournful howls. Funereal keening and mewling. She missed her babies. She was so disconsolate that she forgot to attack us. She was, for once … vulnerable.
Here she is, during that dreadful lonely day:
We brought the reengineered kits back home that evening. Gramps never showed joy, exactly, but did she revert quickly to self: sullen, silent, grumpy, menacing. Still, we noticed a difference.
It had apparently dawned on Grandpa, finally, that Rachel and I are not bent on mincing her and her progeny up in a cat-grinding machine and feeding her to the dog. She still hates Rachel because Rachel has been the kindest to her and Grandpa mistook this for weakness. Grandpa is an ingrate. But she now allows me to scratch her behind the ears, sometimes. As she eats, I am very occasionally permitted to massage her spine and lie to her that she is a good girl.
And the kits?
The Kits are All Right! They petition for rubs and skritches. They have the run of the house, now, and utilize it with a sense of entitlement. They boing off furniture. They claw our horrible green sofa. Lexi gets along fine with them. But — because she and Lexi do not see eye to eye — Gramps is still confined to the kitchen and basement. How do we manage that? There is a gate between the kitchen and the rest of the house. The kits can squeeze through the pickets, or leap over the fence. Grandpa can do neither. She has porked out a bit:
The same scientific incapacity that prevented us from correctly gendering Grandpa also affected the gendering of the kits. Voila: Francine is no longer Francine. He is Francois. Canarsie (female) and Pittsburgh (male) retain their names.
This is Canarsie. She’s the shy one. She has a squirrel tail and a vulnerable yet sultry face, like Clara Bow. She squeaks when she talks, like Betty Boop.
This is Francois. The friendliest. He loves massages and isn’t bashful about demanding them.
And this is Pittsburgh, the would-be sister rapist. Pittsburgh purrs loud and steady, like an idling muscle car V-8 engine:
I know, you think that Pittsburg and Francois are very possibly one cat that we have photographed twice. You never see them in the same room at the same time, you mutter. Here:
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Postscript. We think we might have a good lead on who the dad is! We caught this guy snurfling around the outside of the house. He ran away after we snapped his picture on the front porch. See what you think:
(If we ever bring him in, of course, we’ll name him Grandma.)
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That’s it for today.
Today’s Gene Pool Gene Polls are about minimalism of modernity:
Poll One:
Poll Two:
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Good. We are done, except for your generosity. WE HAVE SEVEN MOUTHS TO FEED: