Our two cats hang out a lot on the bookshelves in my study, where I have
baskets secured by cord. One bookshelf with no back stands at the end of my
computer desk, in front of the window, with a wide view of the patio. But of
course the two prime locations are between my monitor and keyboard, and atop
any open manuscript that I happen to be editing. We enjoy little snacks in
my study, too: usually unsalted peanuts, which both cats like.
ELT, our tortoiseshell, is the model for Kit in the Joe Grey mysteries, she is
Joe and Dulcie's wild little sidekick. Black and white Lucy has not appeared
in the series; she is the critic, the silent watcher.
Our first two years in Carmel, when we moved here from Atlanta, were spent
living with ongoing construction. Eating, sleeping and working among open
ladders, torn out Sheetrock, and stacks of new lumber as our contractor
repaired the understructure of our hillside house and then remodeled the main
floor. During that time we moved the cats' headquarters from room to room,
to keep them safe. Evenings, when the workers had gone home, were playtime.
During those two years amidst the turmoil of phone calls, guys knocking
on my study door with questions, sometimes no heat, or the power turned
off, and always the banging of hammers and the scream of electric saws,
the cats and I found what privacy we could while I worked on the Joe Grey
mysteries. The cats were bored, and often frustrated, but they weathered
the turmoil very well--though it took a while for them to adjust to being
indoor cats after roaming near our lake cabin in Georgia. They are
mellowing now, they are fat and sassy and far more in control of their
world than when they came to us as strays.
Lucy was two years old when we got her from our local volunteer rescue
in Georgia. They had trapped her and had found her litter of kittens.
They caged her with her litter, and found homes for the babies. When we
took her, she weighed four pounds, just a handful of scruffy fur over
bones; she had spent all her strength hunting, to keep herself and her
kits alive. You could feel every vertebra, every rib.
Now she's eight pounds of silky purring loveliness, And still, every
spring, she again becomes preoccupied and agitated, needing to hunt,
needing to provide for the kittens that are still there in some secret
pocket of her memory.
ELT was less than a year old when my pilot husband found her at our small
local airport: The field was deserted, the November night windy and cold.
She was tiny, thin and LOUD, demanding to be fed and cared for. ELT means
Emergency Locator Transmitter--the electronic device that emits a loud radio
message if your plane has crashed, if you're in trouble. That night she
definitely was in trouble, abandoned on a huge, cold airfield hungry and
afraid. My husband must have been the first human she saw after she was
dumped, or the first who paid any attention to her. Like an efficient ELT,
she broadcast her distress signal; her yowls let him know exactly what
she needed.
When he brought her home, she took over our house, bullying shy Lucy, storming
up the bookcases like she was going to the moon, walking on the overhead
beams, totally trashing my desk, destroying whatever efficiency I'd managed.
More than one finished manuscript went to HarperCollins with claw marks and
muddy pawprints on the pages. She loved to chase a flock of full-grown
Canadian geese into the lake. She would race into the water up to her belly,
stand watching them flap away through the water honking and scolding, and
would return to the house wet and muddy, hugely pleased with herself.
Joe Grey, P.I. himself was an unwanted kitten. Not officially a stray, but
about as close as he could get to being abandoned. I met the original Joe
Grey some years ago, when we lived in Atlanta--a skinny, half-grown kitten
belonging to some neighbors who were so obtuse they put his meals on the
floor where their big dogs slurped it up, the kitten hadn't a chance.
Nearly starving, he found he could slip in through our cat door to share supper with our calico. She didn't like that much, but Joe prevailed; we doubled the rations; and when he appeared one day with a broken, infected tail, we asked the neighbors if we could have him.
We could, with pleasure!
Most of his tail had to be docked, leaving a jaunty two-inch stub. We nursed him back to health and meant to keep him. But Miss Mousse had other ideas. When she remained hurt and sulking, we found Joe a home with a bachelor friend and his golden retriever. Dog and cat hit it off at once, sharing bagels and donuts from the top of the refrigerator after Joe knocked them to the floor, opening cupboards, enjoying endless mischief.
When our friend got married, Joe was soon running a household of many
dogs and cats, birds and goldfish, handling the menagerie with iron-
clawed authority--an indomitable and clever tomcat, perfect model for a
smart-mouthed, high-rolling feline sleuth.
| Here I am with Mousse, who was the inspiration for Melissa in The Catswold Portal. | I guess I have an affinity for neighbors' cats, because some years ago, another neighbor's cat moved in with us, on Christmas eve. Maybe I shouldn't have made him welcome with a hot supper and a soft blanket--but it was snowing, and I thought he was a stray! When we learned otherwise, we took him back home, but he wouldn't stay, he liked the service better at our house. Simon lived with us for a year. He moved back to his old home the following Thanksgiving, in time for turkey. Maybe he was on a kitty sabbatical. | |
At the stables we had Peggy, a gray shorthair who, walking atop the pasture fence, would step onto the back of the gentlest old gelding and take a little ride.
Peggy would run beside my father when he went to irrigate the pastures. Wading hip-deep in water, she watched for the first rabbit to escape from its burrow--but not from her swift claws. Catching it, she would drag it across the flooded pasture to her kittens, to teach them about wild game and about the finer points of hunting.
When my husband was a young probation officer, in San Bernardino, he was often gone for several days. We had two black cats then, and on a summer midnight I woke to see Scrappy pacing in the open window, growling like a little panther. Peering out, I saw a man standing in the bushes--he could have stepped right through the window. I was young, and frightened. I phoned my neighbor, he called the police, and they caught the prowler. Several years later, when we lived in Panama, again I woke at night to Scrappy's growling from the open window. I looked down from the second floor to see a man slipping through the yard--but this time when I called the cops, the guy turned out to be one of them.
But how was Scrappy to know the guy was an undercover officer? A prowler is a prowler, and my little watchcat got double rations the next morning.
To imagine our lives without cats stirs such an empty feeling. To imagine our human world without any animals at all, is, for me, to imagine a vast and empty void sterile in the extreme. No bird, no beast. No warm fur to stroke, no mute friend who is yet so eloquent, no eye of another species in which to gaze and speculate, no wondrous and tentative communication with one who is not like us. To be surrounded only with other humans--who are often very dull--to encounter no other form of intelligence or joyfulness or wit, seems to me unthinkably tedious.
