July 10, 2004

• Doggone cat gone!

  I’ve not
  blogged for a few days because I only had one thing on my mind to put
  in my journal and it was something I didn’t want to “talk” about until
  I was sure.  I guess I was sure, had strong suspicions anyway, by
  Wednesday evening.  Thursday morning, when Greyfox called I told
  him Pidney had been gone a while, I hadn’t seen her since Tuesday
  afternoon.  I missed her Tuesday night, because she usually sleeps
  with me (or on me), but I hadn’t said anything to Greyfox the first
  day, thinking, hoping, wanting to believe maybe she’d be back. 
  When it finally sank in that she wasn’t coming home, I didn’t feel much
  like writing.

  Very
  early Thursday, while I was still asleep, Doug went out looking for
  her.  He said he, “spent an hour and a half walking around the
  neighborhood calling her, and then half an hour crying on
  Granny.”  Granny Mousebreath is Pidney’s mother, and she’s the cat
  who chose Doug as her primate when we moved in here.  Pidney’s
  sister Muffin picked Greyfox and Pidney chose me.  She’d walk in
  the woods with me and she’d talk to me, telling me all about her lost
  love Raoul who had left her here and gone, first to Krakow, then to
  Rio.  She kept asking for a map, and we guessed that it was so she
  could hop on her motor scooter and go looking for Raoul.

  I’m
  only half joking there.  Pidney was very vocal and she had a
  number of distinct vocalizations, things that sounded like, for
  example, Krakow, Rio, and Raoul.   Her purr sounded like a
  motorbike.  She was the only one of these three cats who was
  bonded with Leroy, their original owner’s black wolf-hybrid dog. 
  The dog and cat would often go in and out together, and if one was
  inside when the other came back, they would touch noses in
  greeting.  Mark left them all in our care for the winter when he
  went to Florida in 1998.  The following spring, he came back and
  flew out again with Leroy.  Pidney started crying for “Raoul”
  then, and started spending a lot of time under the table in the corner
  that had been Leroy’s den.

  I
  guess I’m adjusting.  I haven’t gone to the door looking for her
  today.  Yesterday and the days before, I’d jump up every time I
  thought I heard her at the door.  She could sometimes open the
  door herself from outside by throwing her little body at it, if it
  wasn’t stuck too tight, and also sometimes would hook a claw behind the
  corner of the steel sheathing on the inside of the door and try to pull
  it open to go out.  It usually stuck too hard shut for her to pull
  it open, but sometimes she succeeded.  Often, though, all she’d
  succeed in doing was making the steel go “twang” until someone woke up,
  got up, and let her out.  I was that someone.  I don’t think
  either of the other two cats even tries to open the door herself. 
  Pidney was the independent and adventurous one.

  Greyfox
  called her a “belly rub slut” because she used to roll over and flash
  her white underside, but she didn’t really like belly rubs.  If
  you’d try to tickle her belly, she’d grab the offending hand with all
  four clawed paws.  She did like to roll in the dirt and in the
  snow, and would often do it if I’d turn to look back at her when she
  was following me.  I interpreted it as a ploy to get
  attention.  The belly was defintely the showy part of her, that
  and her eccentric mustache.  We call all cats with that tuxedo
  color pattern “dinks”, and it was D’Artagnan (AKA Dinky Puddums),
  probably Pidney’s son, who was the first of our cats to be called a
  dink. 

  Puddums
  was from the first and only litters of kittens that Mark allowed Penny
  (what he called the cat I renamed Pidney after she diagnosed my kidney
  stones) and her sister Prissy (whom we call Muffin) to have before he
  had them spayed.  He gave all those kittens to Doug to sell at the
  Talkeetna Bluegrass Festival, and Doug kept one of them.  That
  made that little black tuxedo pattern kitten the “fourth Faluter” at
  our house when he moved in with our cats Webley, Bill and Kenna. 
  They were called Faluters because their mother was Fancy. 
  “Faluter” is a sniglet for those satin cords on the menus at fancy
  restaurants.  Mark had given the cat he called Fancyface (sister
  to Pidney and Muffin and the best of Granny’s kittens–and Mark didn’t
  call her Granny, he called her Sassy–that’s her behind and to Pidney’s
  right in the pic at right here) to us while all three of the “kittens”
  were pregnant, to add some healthy new genes to the feral pool at our
  place.  So, of course, the fourth Faluter became D’Artagnan and
  since that was too high-falutin’ for Greyfox, he started calling him
  Puddums.

  Doug
  kept crooning over the new kitten and talking about how “formal” he
  looked in his little tuxedo, like a diplomat.  Our whole family
  was reading Richard Marcinko’s Rogue Warrior
  series around that time.  Dickie Marcinko doesn’t like
  diplomats.  He calls them, “heel rocking, pocket jingling,
  pencil-dicked diplo-dinks.”  So, I started calling the
  formally-dressed
  cats “dinks” and it stuck.  We were never sure whether our
  D’Artagnan was Pidney’s or Muffin’s, because the litters were mingled
  when we got them.  Fancy and all the original faluters have gone
  into the food chain, and now so has Pidney, but their genes remain in
  the feral pool across the highway, their images are in our photo
  collection, and their memories are in our hearts.
  

  • 8:38 pm
  • 20 Comments