 The
Cat's Meow
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| Issue 12, vol 5 | The Cat Gives Thanks | November 22, 2006 |
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Thankful For Cats In our email this week, there was an article called "Thankful For Cats". The author reminisced about her favorite cats, saying that she was thankful that they had enriched her life. We, too, are thankful for cats. And, so are you! The Cat's Meow would like to thank everyone who sent a picture and story about their feline friends, and to share them with you....
This is "Peanut Many Toes" He's a polydactyl cat with 22 toes. Thanks so much for your news letters. Shared by Patricia in Oakhurst, CA USA
Maggie was adopted at Pet Smart through a rescue shelter where she was found abandoned with her brother in a trailer park. She is the most adorable kitten we have ever owned and is so fully of energy. Shared by Allan & Lynne in Iron Station, NC USA
My Cat's name is Woodsman. My pride and joy! Shared by Kathy in Fenwick, Ontario, CA
My cat's name is Harmony Jane Marie. She is 16 years old. Born in Jan 1990. Shared by Lila in South St. Paul, MN USA
As we begin our sixth year online, The Cat's Meow would like to thank our subscribers, new and old, for letting us share all the good things you find in this newsletter. We're particularly grateful to those who have sent us kind words of encouragement and donations to keep the websites online. We'd also like to thank Matt Tourtillott of MarkeTrends Productions, our new hosting company. Thanks to Matt, we no longer are offline for days for using "too much" bandwidth. May you all be blessed today and in the coming year!
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Barbwire Cats |
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Part One: Clayton’s Story (continued from previous issue) In 1941 The Great Attack came to Barbwire, California. This attack was a boundless ocean of rats and Barbwire was going to need every single kitty-cat it could get its hands on! Before the Rat-War, there had never been any cats in Barbwire. Now, not only were they here, they were genuine, honest-to-goodness celebrities ... It just so happens that I myself have a cat. I found her quite by accident while driving through the town of Oaxaca, Mexico. Within two years, Guadalupe, or Lupe as we called her, was a full grown beauty. She was pure white, except for a miniscule black spot right in the center on top of her head. Her personality could easily be summed up in one word: Love. That’s the only way I can explain it. She gave me the feeling that if I could see inside of her, I would see what love actually looks like; complete, unreserved, and unconditional. I could recognize this in her, because it was the same way that I loved my wife Terry ... Installment 7 But Terry was taken from us in October of 1996. Lupe was three, I was forty-four and I was finished, destroyed, and kaput. I guess was a good thing that Terry and I hadn’t had the kids we always hoped for, because for the next two years I closed myself in my house, never answered the door or the phone, pretty much stopped eating, I slept about twenty hours a day, never cleaned the house, hardly ever took a shower, shaved, or even brushed my teeth. The pain of losing her was so horrible, that if my cat Lupe hadn’t been here, following me everywhere like gum on a shoe, sitting with her chin on my leg while I cried, staying on the bed with me for eighteen to twenty hours a day I really doubt if you’d be reading this story right now. I don’t know when she slept, because whenever I woke up, there she was, lying next to my head wide awake, watching over me. Now, with all due respect to Terry’s Father, my late Father-in-law, I’ve never seen anything sneaky or dangerous about Lupe. But then again, I’ve only known her for thirteen years, so maybe her sneaky, dangerous side will show up any time now. Yeah, that’s probably it. I have to admit he was right about one thing though, she almost never does anything I ask her to do. I really like that about her, she has complete integrity. I know right away if she’s not gonna do something I ask her. A friend of mine put it like this, “If you want to control something, get yourself a dog.” After about two years, the pain of losing Terry finally passed, and I was lifted out of the darkness. For a long time, it was just me and Lupe. And that worked out just fine. We’re still here in Barbwire, and it’s still a great place to live, but it’s no longer just me and Lupe. Now it’s me, Lupe, and Psycho. My best friend, Sean Moran, is a Deputy Sheriff here in Barbwire. We’ve been friends since the first grade. Once in a while he’ll invite me to go with him on a ride-along. It’s always fun to imagine I’m a cop. I decide (in my imagination) whom I’d pull over, and whom I’d let slide this one time, with only a warning (such power!). Sean is a great cop. He knows what he’s doing out there, and he still loves people, even after 17 years of police work. Plus, Sean has more funny stories than everybody else I know put together. In April 2003, I went with Sean on a ride-along. It was my eighth or ninth time. A very uneventful ten hours, but I had a blast anyway. When we got back to the station house after “our” shift we drove around behind the Mechanics’ shop to hose some of the desert mud off the car. Now, here in Barbwire, the Sheriff’s Office doubles as the Animal Control Office. There’s a big cage behind the Mechanics’ shop, and that one big cage is divided into three smaller cages. The dog-inmates are kept there until their owners come and bail them out. Or until the Judge says they’ve got to go. The dogs are housed according to the seriousness of their offenses. Just like human prisons, they have Minimum, Medium, and Maximum Security. This is supposed to protect the more sociable prisoners from the real animals. And just like human jails, it is always overcrowded. Whenever I’m at the station, I always stop by the doggy-jail to see who got busted, and to make sure they have food and water. Did you ever see that great children’s TV show where they always sing that song about “What doesn’t belong?” You know, it goes, “One of these things is different from the others, one of these things is different from the rest!” Then they show pictures of four or five things, and everybody is supposed to guess which thing doesn’t belong with the rest. I love that part, and I guess right almost every time. So when I saw a huge tiger-striped tom-cat in the Maximum Security cage, with two Pit-Bulls, and a Doberman, I guessed right away that THE CAT was the thing that didn’t belong. Looking back, I have decided that this cat must have used some kind of secret Doggy-Mind-Control-Technique to convince the dogs that he wasn’t really there, because none of the dogs were paying any attention to him at all. He didn’t have any Pit-Bull & Doberman attack-type injuries (injuries like those are easy to spot) and I could tell by looking at him, he wasn’t even a little bit afraid. If I had to describe it, I’d say he looked bored and disgusted. He was just laying there among the dogs, doing his time. I yelled for Sean to come here a minute. He came over and I pointed at the cage. “Hey, Inspector Clouseau!” I yelled, “There’s a cat in there!” (Continued in the next issue of The Cat's Meow) David Perry lives in the High Desert of southern California with his two cats, Psycho and Lupe. His first novel "WHISPERING CATS" is due out mid-year 2007. |
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