Bizarre Feline

So I took a break between writing the last post and proofreading it to go to the bathroom. While I was thus involved Tarbaby the cat came in and decided to join me by using his litter box. I hate to say this, because Tarbaby is a good, if occasionally over affectionate beast, but my cat is decidedly strange.

My upstairs bathroom is very small. So Tarbaby finished his business in the catbox. What does a normal cat do? A normal cat promptly scratches up litter and covers the evidence, as it were, right? (I may add that the litter box is scrupulously cleaned at least once a day.) Yes, well...I don't have a normal cat. Tarbaby proceeded to scratch: the bathroom door, the wall outside the box, the opposite side of the box, the rim of the box, and finally, reaching out, the floor. None of these locations contained anything remotely resembling what one would have thought would be the object of the scratching. (Although the floor occasionally is, when, as mentioned in an earlier post, I believe, Tarbaby decides to use the litter box backwards...i.e., standing on the rim with his rear pointed in the wrong direction. One would think a cat of his age would have outgrown trying these trick shots.)

Now that I think of it, I have had far too many peculiar cats in my time. There was Clancy. Clancy was an enormous black and white tuxedo cat whom I acquired because a friend had two elderly cats and was given Clancy when he was a kitten, and he terrorized the two seniors. When I had had Clancy for a couple of months, I took him to the vet. I thought he was either blind or had inner ear problems, because I had, up until that time, never met a cat who walked into walls and fell off tables before. The vet kept Clancy overnight and ran all sorts of (very expensive) tests on him, and returned him to me the next day, saying, "Well, what you have here is a very healthy one year male cat who's extremely stupid." At which point Clancy purred, smiled, perambulated to the edge of the examining table and promptly fell off it. He also had a habit of getting into the laundry hamper, pulling out Matthew's underpants, and dragging them around the floor, moaning voluptuosly. That was a little strange.

And Bigfoot. Bigfoot was another enormous cat, gray and white. Bigfoot appeared at our door one rainy night around Christmas, walked in and announced that she lived with us now. We tried to put her out again, and we hung signs all over the neighborhood, and we checked with all the neighborhood vets - and by the time we were finished, we had gotten to know Bigfoot (so named because she had six toes on each front paw), and realized that nobody in their right mind would choose to live with this beast. (I mean, when she ended up at our place, she still had stitches from being spayed...somebody REALLY got exasperated - and was wantonly cruel, I may add.) She had the worst personality of any cat I've ever met in my life. She would jump up in your lap (and you'd sag in your chair because she must have been 20 pounds at least - she was HUGE), you would give her a scratch under the chin, and then she'd bite the hell out of you. Sometimes she'd try to purr, which was disturbing because she had evidently never mastered the trick of it. She sounded precisely like a very old car trying to turn over. Not a nice kitty rumble...more like, UR, UR, UR (gargle), UR.

Then there was the half Siamese whose name I can't remember who had been an abused cat who woke me up every night trying to get at my eyes - poor beast, I had to have her put down after the vet said she couldn't be rehabilitated.

Do you think, somewhere in my future, there's an actual, normal CAT? I dream of kittens...but I really couldn't do that to poor old Tarbaby (after all, he must be nearly 15 now), who's already somewhat traumatized by the lack of his brother Blackfoot and our lovely Gypsy - who actually WAS a normal cat. Maybe there's hope.

Love, Wendy