First Night, Laura Walker, and the Crazy Cat Post

Well, my first night in my new house was pretty uneventful. I spent a lot of time playing with Isis and reading a book called Endangered Species, a mystery set on nearby Cumberland Island. The neighborhood definitely got to hopping around 10:30 or 11pm, with folks cruising by with their rap booming, and a lot of people hanging out in the street. But they all went to bed before I did – and it was certainly a lot quieter than living under the flight line for Lindbergh Field like I did for two and a half years! This morning, after observing how little Isis had eaten, I began considering Don’s suggestion that she might have an under active thyroid. That condition apparently contributes to lethargy, and this cat is a lot more lethargic than she used to be, back when she would race around in the yard like she thought she was a dog. We shall see; I’m keeping a close eye on her.

This afternoon, mom and I went to the Laura S. Walker State Park. It was my suggestion, as I’d never been. Mom warned me that there wasn’t much to do or see there, but we went anyway; she was definitely right. It was probably one of the least interesting State Parks I’d ever been to, and I’ve been to a good number. There was a gorgeous manmade lake... but no swimming was allowed (apparently due to the possible presence of alligators), and it seemed like quite a waste. There was a pool, picnic areas and a golf course, but not much else. It had two nature trails, but they were of the sort that meander through nature with ever getting to anything particularly scenic. I like my nature trails to have a destination – a waterfall or an overlook or something. We stopped by my house, played a bit with Isis and sat for a while on the front porch before heading back to mom’s house – time for dinner and a bit o’ blogging.

Serene picnic area, Laura S. Walker State Park

The have a nice beach area, with bouys and everything...
But swimming is prohibited!

I found this not-so-little guy in the bushes at my house.

Today I’ll give you the cat post. If you’re not a cat person, the rest of this post probably won’t interest you all that much. If you are, however, a cat person, please keep reading. And look at the pictures, too!

A visit to my mother isn’t simply a visit to Sandy Keeler; it’s a chance to commune with an entire entourage of cats. Yes, my mom is a cat lady – she currently has twelve. Is this a bit crazy? Yes. Do I have to live on large quantities of Sudafed and Kleenex whenever I’m there? Yes. Would we have it any other way? No. In fact, at least half of these kitties are my fault. My mom doesn’t have cable TV. She receives only one channel (PBS), and that one doesn't even come in all that well. However, twelve cats, each with a uniquely individual personality and history provide more than enough entertainment.

Koshka

I found Koshka during my Sophomore year of college, fall semester (1998). I was attending the University of the South (Sewanee) and at the time I was feeling rather depressed. Now, there’s nothing better for remedying a case of the blues than a cat. I spied Koshka, a scrawny orange fellow, standing in the midst of a large construction site (what was to become Sewanee’s controversial new dining hall) looking lonely and confused. I coaxed him out, and promptly stuffed him into my backpack (he was not pleased) and lugged him back to my house. It was campus housing, and technically, we were not allowed to have pets... although I successfully kept him hidden the remaining three months of the semester. (My house mates and the cleaning staff were quite wonderfully complicit in this endeavor.) At the end of the semester, I brought him home to mom. At the time, my mom lived a seven hour drive to the south in Lake City, FL. Koshka, who began to panic as soon as his first car ride began, began having diarrhea within the first thirty minutes of our drive. I was bumming a ride home with a friend at the time, and I’m quite surprised he didn’t kick us out at the Georgia/Tennessee border. I’m sure he thought about it! Koshka’s an old boy now, sluggish and clumsy, but he seems quite happy – and he always sleeps on my pillow when I sleep at my mom’s house.

Harry Orange Kitty

By my Senior year of college, I’d learned not to pet strange cats. When you see a cat from a distance, you can delude yourself into thinking it has a home. When you pet it, when you feel its bones protruding through its unfed skin, when it looks up at you and purrs, you know it’s asking for help. Suddenly you feel responsible for it. It was nearing the end of my last semester at Sewanee when I first saw Harry: a giant puff-ball of orange fur sitting outside the Russian House. He was so large that I thought surely, here was a well-fed cat. He must belong to my neighbors – therefore, I could safely pet him. It turned out that under all that fluffy fur he was nothing but skin and bones. Soon a car pulled into the driveway, frightening the cat; he ran and hid underneath the Russian House. I bought some cat food and began feeding him every day by his hidey-hole under the Russian House. I named him Orange Kitty, and by the time I graduated, he would come whenever that name was called. Unlike Koshka, Orange Kitty was a great companion for the car ride to Florida, although when he arrived at his new home, my mother refused to call him Orange Kitty. She christened him Harry (although I feel this is rather an inappropriate name for a cat). These days I call him Harry Orange Kitty – and he does come to it.

Jesse

When my mom was teaching at Lake City Community College, there was a feral cat living on campus, whom my mom named Xena. Xena popped out two litters of kittens before my mom was able to trap her and have her spayed. Xena returned to the wild, but her kittens stayed with my mom. The first of Xena’s kittens were Whiskey and Jesse. Whiskey, unfortunately, ran away following my mother’s move from Florida to Georgia, but Jesse is still around. He’s a sweet cat, quiet and shy, a short-haired black and white cat, whom you’d never guess by his temperament that he was named after Jesse James. The day my mom caught him (at the time he was a feral kitten) she nabbed him with her bare hands. And he ripped them to shreds, thus earning the name of a fierce fighter. Never again has he shown such temperament. He’s the calmest and quietest of the bunch.

Lefty

Tuffy

Dusty
Can you tell them apart? I can.

The second batch of Xena’s consisted of three orange and white shorthairs. My mom was apparently suffering from a bit of a western kick when she named them, because they received the monikers Lefty, Tuffy and Dusty. Lefty, so named because she can be distinguished from the other two by a patch of orange under her left eye, is both shy and head-shy (she cringes if you try to pet her head), but she loves to snuggle. Tuffy was always a tough (get it?) loner in Florida, spending most of her time outside, shunning people, and reacting with a snarl if one paid her too much attention. That all changed with the move to Georgia. Suddenly she became a fierce snuggler like Lefty, and she rarely goes outside. Dusty is similar in temper to his brother Jesse, although far more talkative. He has a disconcerting habit of joining conversations in such a way that you’re *sure* he’s trying to contribute something important... but what? I wish I knew.

Isis

One summer in Florida, my mother and I delivered phone books to a large portion of Columbia County. The job was exhausting, took forever, was conducted in the stifling Florida summer heat, and paid very, very little. But, we were both in need of money, and neither of us had anything better to do. We delivered phone books for about a week. On the last day, while pulling up to a convenience store for gas and something to drink, we found a skinny black cat nursing two tiny kittens. Of course, we couldn’t just leave them there. We used the phone book money to pay for shots and spayings. The mother cat was solid black with long and pointy ears. I still remember the vet’s first comment when he first saw her: “Wow! She’s got some ears on her!” Her ears gave her a decidedly Egyptian look. I would have loved to give her an Egyptian feline-goddess name, but to my mind, neither Bast, bastet nor Sekhmet make for good cat names. (Seriously, you’d end up calling the poor critter “bastard” or “sexy”!) Instead, we settled on Isis, the Egyptian mother-goddess. In the years since we fist discovered Isis, her body has filled out to surpass her ears; she now weighs over twenty pounds and is currently at “kitty fat camp” at my house. (See yesterday’s post.)

In memory of Shadow

We named Isis’s two kittens Echo and Shadow. Shadow was a fearless, spunky tabby who, sadly, was killed by a dog after only a few short months in our care. (The dog was immediately put down.)

Echo

Echo was solid black, just like her mother, and was just as fearless as Shadow. But oddly enough, Echo was the clumsiest kitten I have ever encountered; she injured herself numerous times. We’d only had her for about a month when she climbed to the top of a wicker cabinet, slipped, fell, and fractured her pelvis. She had to be confined to a cage for several months after while the bones knitted. To this day she has a funny walk, although it doesn’t slow her down one bit. She loves gallivanting around the neighborhood, flirting with the boy kitties (she has a special relationship with Tommy), killing birds and bringing their carcasses inside the house, and hanging out atop the wicker cabinet.

Tommy

I spotted Tommy on my way home from work one evening, back when I was working the deer job. I saw a cat run cross the highway ahead of me, and watched in horror as a pickup truck swerved towards it in an obvious attempt to run it over. The truck barely missed. The cat had run into a convenience store parking lot; I pulled in after him. I got out of the car, and saw him standing there, crying. I called him over to me. He was well-fed, and surely must have had a home. But, there were no houses nearby, and the cat was obviously in danger, so I took him home. We named him Tommy, as he was obviously a tomcat at the time. We ran ads in the local paper, but as no one called to claim him, Tommy remained with us. Unfortunately, after a month or so in our care, it became obvious that something was wrong. Tommy ate voraciously, consuming everything in sight, and drank equally, draining all the water bowls in the house (and there were many) before plunging his head into the toilet. At first Tommy gained a lot of weight, to the point that his skin was stretched taught, like a balloon ready to pop. Then he suddenly and rapidly began to lose weight. His hair began to fall out, and he began to suffer from bouts of diarrhea. I googled his symptoms, and the result was not good: diabetes. We took him to the vet, and our fears were confirmed. We expected to be advised to put him down. Instead, we were instructed on how to care for a cat with diabetes. We were told that with proper care, he could live approximately eighteen more months. That was nearly four years ago. Tommy receives insulin injections twice daily. As long as he has a bowl of food in front of him he neither notices nor minds. He’s the happiest cat of the bunch, and definitely the Alpha Male (despite the fact that “Tommy” is now a misnomer).

Tommy and Echo
(As an aside, Tommy and Echo have recreational sex. Both cats are fixed, so neither should have any hormonal need to do the deed, but they go at it periodically. It’s quite disconcerting. Who knew photos of cats could be sleazy?)


Ollie

In early 2003, our bit of hitherto unnamed road in Florida was named Olaf Glen by the county. Who was Olaf? Well, we called the county roads people and were told that the name had been generated at random by a computer. A few nights later, my mom came into my room. It was around four in the morning. She shook me awake hissing, “Jane! Get up now! We have a visitor!” I was pretty freaked out, although I should have known our “visitor” would be feline. He was gorgeous – part Siamese, with beautifully defined points and clear blue eyes. He was also the first stray to simply wander up to the front door and ask to be let in (with loud, yowling cries) of his own accord. He was unbearably sweet, the sort of cat who loves to purr, knead and drool all over everyone. We named him Ollie, short for Olaf, to give the street name some meaning. Ollie was also a tomcat, of the heavily spraying variety. Annoyingly, we’ve never been able to fully break him of this habit, even after having had him neutered. He’s lucky he’s so damn cute.

Catty
(Doesn't she just look catty?)

Cats eleven and twelve took their cues from Ollie and showed up on their own. They both arrived after my mom moved to Georgia. The first actually belongs to the people across the street. They had never bothered to get her spayed, and would simply cart her litters of kittens off to the animal shelter whenever she popped them out. Mom offered to take the cat to get spayed, and they agreed. You’d think that after that the cat would’ve hid whenever my mom came into view. Instead, she began hanging out on mom’s front porch. Mom named her Catty, partly because she took to hanging about during Hurricane Katrina and partly because she’s, well, catty. As in bitchy. She hangs out on the front porch (where mom feeds her) and defends it against the other eleven as if to say, “This is *my* porch. Get your own!” She doesn’t seem to realize that she’s the newcomer.

Ruffy

The other newbie arrived shortly after Catty. The first we knew of him was a cat fight in the front yard, followed by Tommy, coming in and bleeding. It took a while for Tommy to tolerate this newcomer, a fluffy, black cat, buff with muscle, a rival for Tommy’s position as Alpha-male. It also took a while before we were able to get a clear glimpse of this black phantom ourselves, as initially, he’d run off at the first sign of humans. But eventually he warmed up to us; food will tame any cat, given time. Mom named him Ruffy because he has a light grey ruff of fur around his neck, because (we thought) he was a rough stray, and because he was a bit of a ruffian. We later learned that he wasn’t exactly a stray. The neighbors to the right of us were an elderly couple. The Ruffy had belonged to the old man, who apparently doted on him. Then the old man died. The widow fed the cat, but wholly ignored him otherwise. As we’ve come to learn, Ruffy is an attention hog – I’ve never known a cat this needy for attention and affection. Once he decided we weren’t scary, he was all over us. He usually lives outside, sharing the front porch with Catty, although he comes indoors on extremely hot or extremely cold days... and then you simply cannot keep him off your lap!