A Dickens of a Cat

Boots was my feline companion from my early teens until I moved out of the house at age eighteen. She helped me limp through adolescence. Best of all, she helped me connect to my distant stepfather—a connection that slowly but surely became as strong as blood.

When I was five years old, my mother brought home the man who would become my stepfather. He was a handsome, jovial fellow who winked at my sister and me and told us to call him Joe. His name was Hal.

I was craving a father at the time, and he seemed a likely character to fit the bill. Although I was a shy child, I talked to Hal and listened to his thrilling stories and liked him very much. Shortly after he married my mother, my sister and I talked it over and decided to call him Dad.

Now our single-mom household finally looked like a typical middle-class home of the late 1950s variety. My sister and I went to school down our country road, Mom stayed home and cooked and sewed, Dad went to work every day, then returned in the evening to his paper and a pre-dinner cigar. We even had a family dog.

But there was one wrinkle. Unfortunately Dad turned out to be a secretive guy with troubles he did not reveal to our mother. One evening after a couple of years of marriage, he did not come home. There were no fights in the house; he simply did not come home from work, and he stayed away for weeks.

My mother was beside herself with this unexpected problem in her marriage, but that’s another story for another time. Let us just say that eventually Dad brought himself home with no real explanation. My mother took him back, and not much was ever said about it. In fact, the house became almost silent, and it would stay that way for years.

This silent, troubled household was a constant source of worry to me, a sensitive child. I found solace in my cat, a gray stray named Fluffy. She was a gorgeous, long-haired creature, and she bonded with me more than with the others in the house. She let me drape her over my shoulder and carry her everywhere. She slept on my bed every night. When she once gave birth to two stillborn kittens, she began birthing them on my bed. Fluffy and I were close.

I was ten years old when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I hurried home from school early that day, as did schoolchildren all over the frightened nation. At home, I found Fluffy sleeping in the middle of the living room floor and clearly not well. The country was in mourning all that weekend in a way we don’t see today, and commerce shut down completely until after the funeral. That included veterinarians’ offices. Since nobody in the farmland where I lived would ever have considered a sick cat an emergency, this meant we could not take Fluffy to the vet until after the president’s funeral on Monday.

After the funeral, however, was too late, and Fluffy died at the vet’s office the night after the president was laid to rest. The tension of the nation—and of my house—compounded my devastation.

That following spring, while walking home from school, I was approached by another long-haired gray cat right on the road. This cat looked so much like Fluffy that I did a double take. She appeared to be homeless. I’d never seen her before, and I was on a country road, so I assumed she was a drop-off. She simply walked out of a grassy ditch, gave a friendly meow, and rubbed on my ankles in that wonderful figure eight that cats do.

I petted the gray cat, and she followed me home. I truly believed God sent me this sweet and beautiful clone of Fluffy—I still believe that—to help me through my worries. I was tremendously grateful for her.

My mother gently asked me if I had “helped” the cat come home with me. But I was much too sensitive a child to have taken someone else’s cat. Fluffy #2 really did appear on the side of the road and follow me home that day of her own volition, and she chose to stay.

The first Fluffy was a sweet creature, and this Fluffy was even sweeter. She, too, liked to be draped over my shoulder and carried everywhere. This Fluffy and our palomino gelding adored each other in a way I’d never seen between cat and horse. Whenever I wanted to ride but the horse didn’t want to cooperate and be saddled, I would place Fluffy on my shoulder and walk into the grazing field. “Look who I have,” I would coo to the horse.

The palomino would raise his head and saunter over to me. Fluffy purred while the horse nuzzled her. Then I would simply walk to the barn, the palomino following the purring Fluffy. I would plop Fluffy in the manger so the horse could nuzzle her some more, and the horse allowed himself to be saddled without so much as a whinny. Sometimes when he grazed, I would even lay Fluffy across his back, something that should have been dangerous. But the horse seemed to like it. He’d turn his head and nuzzle Fluffy—who purred the entire time—then go back to grazing.

Fluffy #2 and I had a couple of good years together. Then she disappeared one day and never returned. I was so inconsolable that at Christmas that year, my mother promised we would be intentional about finding another cat for me after the New Year.

There are no ordinary cats.

Colette

During my short time with Fluffy #2, Dad walked out again. Like before, there was no fighting beforehand. He was gone for several weeks, then one day he just came home. Like before, my mother took him back. Again, nothing much was said. The house remained quiet.

As for me, I found the situation at home tense and unsettling. I ceased talking to my stepfather at all. He didn’t speak to me either, really. In fact, for years, all we ever said to each other was along the lines of, “Please pass the milk.” And I continued to worry over my silent household.

As a worried child, I did not sleep well. After that run of bad luck with the Fluffys, I rose before everyone else in the mornings to pore over the pet section of the classified ads, looking for another cat. Eventually I found an ad in which a woman wanted a home for what she called her “favorite cat.”

Mom called the woman and learned that this cat needed more attention than the woman could give her because of her other house cats. When Mom told her that the cat would be for a twelve-year-old, the woman was not thrilled. She told my mother that this cat wasn’t for children, and I heard my mother tell her, “My daughter is very mature for her age.”

Apparently that was good enough. Or maybe it was hard to find a home for an adult cat of no particular breed that possessed a mighty strong will.

In any event, Mom and I drove to the lady’s house that night, and we could see right away why Favorite Cat needed more attention. There were eighteen cats living in that small bungalow, and it was a sight I’d never seen before and never forgot. They were all hanging out in a cramped dining room, and the animal energy was noisy and intense. Cats vocalized and crawled all over the tops of tables and old-fashioned buffets, something that would never happen in my mother’s house. It felt like we were interlopers in a miniature house of cats at the zoo.

Boots, already named, strolled into the room. She was a handsome, sturdy cat with round and expressive green eyes. Her short-haired coat was slate gray with white markings on her face and chest as well as on all her feet, creating perfect little boots. I would eventually learn that she had a strong personality—passionate, charming, and fierce. But at this first introduction, I simply noted her regal demeanor.

Boots must have caught on immediately that I was her ticket out of this feline Hades, because she looked me straight in the eye, then pranced to me and rubbed and rubbed on me and only me. This greatly impressed the woman, who remarked to my mother that Boots usually didn’t like children. I suppose it could have been flattery, but the woman did seem genuinely surprised at the attention Boots gave me. I now wonder how many children had actually been inside the cat lady’s house. At any rate, Boots became mine to take home.

Always Room for One More

Most cat behaviorists agree that a house needs one more litter box than the house has cats. If you have two cats, you can get away with two cat boxes, but one more is better. Why? Because bad cat behavior is usually closely linked to litter box issues. In multi-cat households, make sure that if one territorial cat commandeers one cat box (it happens), another box is available. Keep litter boxes in private areas. And the most important thing you can do is scoop the boxes daily. There will never be odor in your home if you do.

Like the Fluffys before her, Boots slept on my bed every night and was a constant companion for me. Unlike the Fluffys, however, Boots was not what one would call sweet. She was not easygoing by any means, and she did not like to be draped over my shoulder or even picked up. She made that clear immediately—right after she whipped the family dog into some kind of canine she could live with.

But I adored Boots right away, and she seemed to like me well enough. I talked to her all the time, and she truly seemed to listen, her lovely white paws placed primly together as she looked into my eyes with a circumspect expression. This had not been the case with either Fluffy. I talked to Boots so much that one night I dreamed she could speak, too. Her voice was high and queenly and pitched like tiny bells. I asked her in the dream why she didn’t ever talk before, and she laughed a sweet little laugh and did not answer; she simply looked mysterious.

I was privileged to be the person Boots slept with, and so this meant I was the one she woke up to get the day started. She did this by sitting on the bed stand and moving breakable items with her paw. The gentle scraping would wake me, and if I didn’t get up, something would land on the floor—often my glasses. Of course I was annoyed, but looking back, I realize that it certainly beat alarm clocks.

One morning during the early silent years before Boots, I had seen Dad feed a stray cat at the back door. We were always firmly instructed by my mother not to feed strays. Mom always had more pets than she really wanted, and they were almost never chosen, so she could be a little shrill about this stray thing.

But here was tense, noncommunicative Dad offering a bowl of milk to a stray cat at the door. And even better, he was speaking to it, softly and gently. I don’t recall him ever talking to either Fluffy, so I wondered, Is this really Dad? In my world of stoic farmers and other hardworking men, I never saw any man pay positive attention to a cat. Never. To see the otherwise silent Dad paying such sweet attention to a cat... well, this knocked me out.

Dad raised his head and saw me. A look of guilt flashed momentarily across his face. “Don’t tell your mother,” was all he said. This was an interesting discovery for me, and now I knew that there was more to Dad than I had been seeing. I also noted that when it came to cats, Dad and I actually had something in common. I tucked the information in the back of my mind.

Consequently, it didn’t take long after she moved in for Boots to discover the Inner Dad. Soon enough, she followed him around, prancing, purring, flirting, rubbing on his legs. And Dad liked it. He talked softly and gently to her. He talked more to Boots than he talked to any of the humans in the house. He even sang to her. He actually made up corny little tunes with her name in them, and, when he thought nobody was listening, he sang them to Boots.

In return, Boots sat with him while he had his early morning coffee by himself in the dark kitchen. She slept in his lap when he read the paper and on his clothes when he was away at work. And then Boots became a link between Dad and me.

In a house where people don’t speak, one can start believing they aren’t listening either. I was listening to everyone, but I didn’t know others were listening to me. But apparently Dad was at least listening to me speak to Boots.

I tend to give nicknames to people and animals. So I sometimes called Boots other names, one being Mrs. Boogan. She was so stately that I felt she seemed like a Mrs. Somebody, and Mrs. Boogan is the name I came up with.

Pretty soon I heard Dad calling the cat Mrs. Boogan. After a while, that’s all he called her. He even used her new name in his silly songs. Apparently he had listened to me sometimes.

This may not seem like a big deal, but I can’t stress enough how we never spoke to each other. I felt invisible in my own home, and Boots seemed to make me visible again.

Boots also became a topic Dad and I could actually talk about to one another. When we sat at the silent supper table, sometimes Boots would hop up on an unoccupied chair and watch us. After a while, she would slowly extend one paw to the table. One of us would say in a mildly scolding tone, “Mrs. Boooogan....” She would stop her paw midair and look around the table as if to say, “Is there a problem?” It was so delightful that we all relaxed. We teased her and fussed over her, and she loved the limelight. But it drew us together.

If we were away, the first thing Dad or I would ask about upon returning home was Boots. We both kept an eye out for her. We both talked to her. And sometimes, we talked to one another through her.

Eventually Dad and I would relax with one another. When I was old enough to drive, we relaxed even more, and I came to the conclusion that he was never comfortable with children. As I grew even older, we developed a bond. There came a day when we never lacked for something to talk about to one another.

Years later, my tough, silent stepfather wept openly at my wedding. And many years after that, at the time he lay dying in Florida, I was dreaming about him in Tennessee. He told my mother that I was in the room, next to him.

It took one strong-willed cat to kick-start a bond between two clueless humans. And it worked.