Author:
Arthur Keith
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Date Posted: 15:39:07 02/19/16 Fri
At the moment we have three dogs and three cats in my house. All of them were animals found on the street. I find it disturbing that people can throw away animals as if they are of no importance. If I could find out who these people were, I would love to have a very close conversation with them.
My wife and I love all of these animals. they have grown to be our children.
Another column picked up from the paper.
>
>My wife and I have always had cats. Simply speaking,
>we like having pets around, and our experience has
>been that cats take less maintenance and looking after
>than dogs. Besides, I like the graceful way most cats
>move even when they're being clumsy, and we have had a
>fair amount of that.
>
>Our first cat, which we got as a kitten shortly after
>we got married almost forty years ago, was a
>long-haired but small for the breed Maine Coon,
>although he was actually a pretty big cat. We were
>driving him home, throwing around possible names;
>being an astronomical buff at the time most of mine
>were of some object in the sky. I had just thrown out
>the name "Polaris" when he said "Mew," and that
>settled it. Polaris he stayed for the rest of his life
>of, as I recall, about fifteen years.
>
>Polaris proved to be well named. In fact, there were
>times I called him "Polaris, the feline missile." Of
>all the cats we've had over the years, and we have had
>many, he was the best jumper and liked the view from
>the heights much more than any of the others. How he
>got to some of the places he managed to get was and
>still is beyond me.
>
>The bed in our first apartment was right in front of a
>window; it really was the only good place for it. We
>kept the drapes closed, but that didn't slow the
>Polekitty (as I often called him) down any. He would
>jump from the bed onto the window divider, which was
>only about an inch and a half or so wide -- he was a
>lot wider than it was by this time -- and from there
>up onto the curtain rod. He would sit up there at the
>top of the room checking things out in his catlike way
>until he got bored and decided to get down. No
>crawling down; he jumped -- after all, it was onto a
>bed.
>
>The heck of it was that he would do this in the middle
>of the night as much as in the middle of the day, and
>at night he would land right between Kathy's and my
>sleeping heads. This was a rude way to be awakened to
>say the least, but after a while we reached the point
>where we could go right back to sleep.
>
>In later years when we moved to different places, he
>was always one to explore the high places. I think he
>enjoyed the jumping down as much as anything, and we
>didn't think too much when he hit the floor with a
>WHUMP from six or eight feet.
>
>I miss the Polekitty. He's been gone a long time now,
>but he was one to remember.
>
>Our current senior cat, Loki, is actually one of
>Amanda's -- she collects cats as much as her parents
>do, and fortunately her husband likes cats, or at
>least is gentlemanly enough not to complain about
>them. Loki doesn't actually look much like Polaris --
>he's a short-hair to begin with -- but if I don't
>watch myself I'll call him by the wrong name anyway.
>
>Loki has never been much of a jumper or a high country
>cat, but he does like to get up on the bathroom
>counter and drink from the faucet if we leave a thin
>stream of water running. He's taught that little trick
>to other cats recently, so the first thing I have to
>do when I get home is to turn on the water for the
>cats, and I often have a line waiting their turn at
>the sink.
>
>The thing is that Loki is seventeen years old, and
>he's had difficulty being able to jump up on the
>counter for some time. A year or two ago we started
>keeping a stool in front of the counter so he could
>make it up to the sink, but now he's having trouble
>making it up that high. I think I'm going to have to
>dream up and make some kind of a two-step stool so he
>can continue to enjoy this little quirk of his.
>
>We like our cats, and we go out of our way to
>accommodate them. Maybe it's like some people say in
>that they do own us, but they've given us a lot of
>enjoyment over the years and I don't know what we
>would do without them.
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