Random Thoughts from a Random Memory

By Edward Master

My wife and I decided early on to have a cat as a pet. She grew up with the furry creatures. I remember her Spooky and Sheba in Springfield, Delaware County. Our first cat was Brutus. Originally, the vet said we had a female so we called it Isis. Needless to say, we changed vets when we required a diagnosis from a different vet and got a different feline sex diagnosis. Our first vet’s degree was from the Caribbean somewhere.

Our next vet, Paul Berg, turned out to be a wonderful vet and we learned later the classmate of our vet in Indiana, PA, as each was a U of PA vet school grad and actually attended vet school as classmates. In Glassboro, Brutus passed due to feline leukemia. We then adopted Tootsie from my sister Shari’s mother-in-law; Tootsie was a calico beauty and a love bug. She liked to bed down on me when I was on the couch. Tootsie (Toots) had her moments though. She was definitely the queen of the house.

In Glassboro, we had a stray cat in the neighborhood (my wife named her C.Z. Guest after some celeb in the news, a bit of a gadabout) who deposited a litter on our back patio; the litter had 1 survivor, a gray with some white; we named him T.C., Tough Cat, after the character on the ‘Magnum P.I.’ TV show. T.C. always wanted to be a buddy to Toots, but she wanted no part of him. Try as he might.

However, T.C. got his girlfriend a little bit later when I brought home Sneakers from neighbor Harry’s tractor tire next door. She was almost all black with four white feet, just like four white sneaker shoes. She too turned out to be another love bug, but oddly enough didn’t purr until about four years had elapsed. We learned she was allergic to milk, too. Then she turned into a purring machine. T.C. and Sneakers became inseparable. Tootsie was still the loner.

Dr. Berg, I think, was impressed, and thankful, that we had adopted two strays. I don’t think he ever charged us to get neither T.C. nor Sneakers fixed. He also insisted on a “Mister” prefix for T.C. since he had to make his home with two females. You could tell he was an animal lover.

Tootsie lived to a ripe 13. She developed a lump/growth under tongue and we had to put her to sleep in Glassboro. T.C. and Sneakers each made it to Indiana, PA, and became friends with the local kids who walked to school {in warm weather the cats occupied open windows). Each died around 16 years of age in Indiana. They were good cats, good pets, good companions. We once thought we had lost Sneakers, but we found her in what must have been an open drawer in a chest of drawers. Oh them cats!

With three furry felines to feed and water and clean out litter boxes while on a leave of absence, we needed a cat sitter. Our first solution was Robby Bates, our neighbor’s older son until he went away to college in South Carolina. Next man up was his younger brother Rodney. That worked until we decided to load up the three in the back of my pickup, add a litter box and bowl of water, and away we went to Turkey City. That’s right, three cats on a road trip.

We never had a problem during the trips up and back to T.C. One or two of them would climb through the sliding glass window in the cab, and then crawl under my feet or the seat. The only “difficulty” we had was roundup for the return to Glassboro. They liked to hide in the cellar’s dropped ceiling.

That worked fine until the arrival of “Pops.” Pops, we named him, was a spitting image of Sneakers. Tootsie, until she passed, was sweet on Pops. One Christmas Rodney thought Sneakers had got loose and went outside. Nope. That was Pops and he spent the holidays inside on the sofa. Sneakers and T.C. were with us in Turkey City.

Eventually animal control wrangled in Pops. We never did know if Pops was Sneakers father, but he sure looked like her.

Our final cat was HaiKu, a long-haired Persian. She was gorgeous. We had to return her to the shelter from where she was adopted when we went to personal care. Fortunately, my wife knew the young girl who initially named her, thus we kept the name, and HaiKu got back with her original owner. None the worse for wear.

I enjoyed the cats. Now my cats are on calendars, usually one with kittens and one full grown adults, but I also have no litter boxes to empty.