I don't mean to complain, but boy do I have a lot of cats. Someone told the wife that all our cats look the same. They don't. There's a picture of them below. Four of them are still with us. One thing they do all have in common is names that begin with the letter B.
I don't know why that is. It's just something that happened.
A million years ago, I was dating a girl named Lauren. She had taken to feeding this obese gray cat with a broken tail outside her apartment. She called her "Owl" or "Owl Baby" most of the time. But we never officially named her. We didn't know if she were a boy or girl, actually, until Lauren managed to capture her & take her to the vet to be spayed. At some point in time - it seemed like years because we were both young but was probably just a few weeks - a beautiful young cat showed up, & he must've been more domesticated, because Lauren was able to catch him quite easily & took him to get neutered.
There, she found out he had feline leukemia. So she decided to keep him indoors, since he could spread the disease to other cats & also his health would worsen in the cruel outdoor world. I named him Blue Boy because I was reading a book by Jean Giono at the time with that as the title; its original title was
Jean le Bleu.
My wife Magda lets me name all our pets, too, which I find weird. Why did Lauren let me name her cat? She did, though. All the cats in this story got named by me.
Lauren moved from her apartment to a duplex some time thereafter, & took both cats with her. Her roommate had two big dogs, golden retrievers if I recall correctly. The cats effectively lived in her room with her. We broke up, sort of, soon after she moved to that duplex, which was weird, because she now lived just two blocks away from me. She decided to travel for the Christmas vacation, & asked if I could feed her cats. She said she didn't know her roommate too well, & felt weird about asking her. She never thought that it might be weird for me to enter a stranger's house regularly to clean a litter box & feed cats. But I did it, because I loved the cats, & was still very much in love with Lauren.
Owl Girl (as we had started calling her) would eat readily when I came, but Blue Boy needed lots of love. While I petted him, the big girl ate all his food. Since I lived two blocks away, & since Blue Boy was amazingly sweet, I just carried him home & fed him there. When Lauren returned, she didn't ask for him back. So he became my first cat.
A few years & a couple of girlfriends, later, I went to Dallas to visit my mother with a beautiful woman named Susan. One of my sisters had a boy tabby kitten she wanted me to take home, & my other sister had a cute tortoise-shell girl cat she wanted me to adopt, so I impetuously decided to adopt both of them, & Susan got to ride back from Dallas with two tiny kittens sleeping in her lap. The girl was given to my friends Joe & Suloni. I kept the boy, whom I named after one of my idols, Buster Keaton. Buster Kitten. Get it?
Blue Boy died a year after I got Buster. He eventually was unable to eat anything, & just wasted away. I am still wracked with guilt about his last days. It's very hard to write about because for a long period there, Blue Boy was my best friend. I thought Buster would be good for him but he probably wasn't. Maybe one day I'll write about how I did just about everything wrong with Blue Boy's condition.
After Blue Boy died, I had Buster tested for feline leukemia. I was so grateful when he tested negative. Blue Boy & Buster did play a lot - Blue Boy was around five years old, & Buster was a kitten.
Buster & I lived together for maybe a year when I adopted Beatrice. I named her that because she was so beautiful & I felt that I would travel through hell to find her. She was pretty much raised by Buster, & she has really only loved the two of us her entire life. When she was a kitten, she would make these mad runs up the curtain in the duplex I lived in. When I would close the curtains on a sunny day, little beams of light would shine through from her claw-holes. When I moved out of the place, I made sure I
left the curtains open when my landlord came by. I wanted to get
some of my deposit back.
Buster & Beatrice got to be the only two cats I had for a very long time, although I had met a girl with a dog by this point, & another dog appeared four years after I got Beatrice. Two years after that, the girl with the dogs who was now living with me called me from her veterinarian's office & asked if she could bring another cat home. This would be a black monster whom I called Bolan, because he seemed to be born to boogie.
Buster died too young of something called FIP. I wrote about it on this blog
at the time. It was, in many ways, harder than Blue Boy's death, since it came on so quickly. I was just looking at pictures of him. I miss his drooly face so much.
We had adopted another beagle by then, & when the family moved to West Virginia, we were two humans, two cats, & three dogs. In West Virginia, a colleague of the woman who was now my wife brought a completely fuzzy thing to our house. They called her Elizabeth, & wanted us to adopt her, because she was living outside in a barn in Ohio, & the wife begged me to let her in. I changed her name to Bronte because she has a strange elegance & didn't seem to be from our time. By this point, of course, I was actively looking for names that started with the letter B.
She, it turned out, has asthma, & that story will have to wait for a different post. But she did turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to Bolan. The two of them spend a great deal of time together. Their affection for one another is downright shameless.
& I guess it's been almost a year - or it will be, in April - that we adopted the most recent of the cats in this place. Did I tell the story here?
Yes, I did. He was a Kentucky adventurer, & so he earned the name of Boone. He & Bolan get along very well, & the wife adores him.
I have to say again: it's rather catty in this place - Beatrice, at nearly 15, is the oldest; Bolan, at almost nine, is the the male patriarch; Bronte, at seven & a half, is the little sister; & Boone, at maybe three? two? is the baby of the house, but only just - a vet told us he was between one & two when we got him, & I gave him the real Daniel Boone's birthday.
Seriously, though.
Awful catty in here.
