Aunty, Aunty, please tell me a story!’
This came from my lovely divine niece.
Said I to her in reply, ‘Well, I----.’
‘Oh Aunty, Aunty, Aunty, come on!’ she said jumping on the bed. So I thought and thought.
I was going to tell her about my latest loving crush… about the handsome man, she just loves to hear those things like most nine year old girls do, but then I thought, ‘Nah… it’ll just break my heart all over again just to even think about and it will be like when you drop a crystal chandelier and you end up having to clean the thousands of sprinkling and glittering pieces yourself and besides, when, when, when will the darling guy ever know that, I…. with my embracing and arms, could be the one for him. Yep, the one. And, as I have said to a friend, ‘Why oh why is human love so terribly complicated and so utterly confusing, honestly, tell me why?’
I decided to tell my little niece about my true, really true love… my faithful and fabulous cat. She just loves to hear about Mr. Kitty. Of course there were many other cats who received my undivided attention, and I could rattle on about each and every one of them, but this story is to be strictly about charming wonderful him, Mr. Kitty, and how he ended up, after his poor and barren and frightening kitten-hood, with winning the golden lottery, me.
When I first moved into the lovely building and into my enchanting apartment there was no Mr. Kitty in the building. But there was at the time, living with me, my beautiful white cat, Princess Twinkles. I was quick to notice, that across from where I was residing, there lived another couple. This couple, man and wife, always had a different cat living with them. That was nice… right? But, as their windows were wide open and there were no window screens… the cats could all jump out and escape. I didn’t think that was so nice. What do you think, my dear? I heard that sometimes the cats would come back to the couple but they would often just vanish and the couple were not too careful about this window business and didn’t seem to care. The wife, who was the one adopting the kitties, was confined to a wheelchair and her husband had trouble walking and really didn’t care for the cats too much. I often thought, ‘Mm, how odd…. why adopt cats if you’re not going to care for them properly?’ Wouldn’t you agree?
Then one day, the wife adopted yet another kitty and named him Joey, a grey and white kitty. Joey is the cat who was one day to become my cat. I wasn’t real friends with the couple, they were quite odd, strange people and, kept to themselves but I would often see their darling grey and white cat by their closed or opened window and the poor little guy would looked amazingly bored or sit on top of the refrigerator just looking out of the window at all the people walking by. Once I saw him, that time the windows were wide opened, happily sitting…. on the nail thin window frames.... and pleasantly smelling the fresh air. I well remember thinking, as I walked by, ‘Yikes, if that were my cat… he would absolutely never, ever, be sitting like that!!!’ I mean my Princess Twinkles was also happily sitting by my opened window and smelling fresh air and making sure that she was regally poised as any queen might be but….. my windows were all well screened!
During this time the wife moved out and went to live in a nursing home where she could get twenty-four hours of nursing care. I thought, ‘Ahh, poor kitty….. now he has no real Mommy. Hopefully Daddy will be good to him. Boy, what a sad life for kitty.’
Before I venture on about kitty… you must know a bit more about the front door to kitty’s apartment. Alas, alas, alas, that door was always left wide opened for hours…. not at night, luckily. I thought, ‘Oh no, now kitty will get out!’ But he proved to be a tremendously stoic and loyal cat about staying in his one home, it was certainly not a fancy or comfortable home, but it was his home and that was that and Daddy did remember to feed him from time to time. Smart kitty, eh? He somehow never escaped from that front door or jumped out of the windows. Often when the cleaning ladies came and left, as cleaning ladies will often do, they would leave everything wide opened, door and windows, but either darling kitty was stuck in a closet by them or by Daddy himself or hiding under the bed, Joey the clever cat, stayed loyal about being in his home with darling Daddy, though darling Daddy really was not much of a caring dad or a darling Daddy.
When I saw Joey sitting on his haunches under the open door, I would say ‘Oh hi honey’ but if I got too close to him… he would whisk, helter-skelter, right back into the apartment. Oftentimes, after these brief and short me-and-Joey introduction moments, I’d return to my nice apartment and say to my Princess Twinkles, who was either curled up nicely in her cozy basket basking in the warm sun or posing by the window, ‘Oh honey, you are such a lucky girl to have such a good Mama and who takes the best care of you…. I really don’t think that this poor kitty has much of a life with that funny Daddy.’
Then came the most frightening thing of all! Actually, it frightened everybody in the building! I couldn’t believe it myself, when I saw what was happening, and all I thought was, ‘Where is that poor, poor cat?’ I think I was the only person who even thought about the cat… no one else did and least of all Daddy, that’s for sure. The frightening thing happened on a Wednesday morning, very early, five or six o’clock in the morning, and I know it was on a Wednesday morning because I had my pool class that day and it was also an extremely hot and sweltering day… yep, hot it was and, man o man, was it hot in the building too. Wildly hot.
Before I venture on with this interesting and frightening stuff, I must say that I was still in deep slumber before I even heard the faint sound of the fire alarm…. I slumber like a heavy log… never hearing a sound otherwise… not even from my unusually loud alarm clock or from the rumbling noise of an earthquake. Eventually I did wake up… hearing a lot of people prattling quite loudly outside my opened window. I always sleep with my windows wide opened, need that fresh air, but remember the windows all had screens so that my darling kitty, Princess Twinkles, could not jump out. As I was saying, people were chattering somewhat loudly. I thought, ‘Boy, they sure talk loud… better go see why they’re talking so loud.’ Oh me, oh my… when I pulled my curtains aside… I saw not only people from my building, dressed or still in PJ’s, I saw firemen, lots of them, pulling big hoses and ropes and ordering everyone where to go, where to stand and, what to do….. and all the poor frightened folks, from the building, looking very sleepy, bewildered and, stunningly shocked. Of course I was in my dressing gown, not frightened but deeply, and mysteriously curious and completely stupefied that this could happen to us! Thus, to clarify my mind a bit, I walked to my front door. Oh-boy-oh-boy-oh -boy, what did my morning eyes behold! Mobs of disoriented and fazed folks coming out of their apartments, many elderly and disabled, escorted by masses and quantities of handsome firemen and firegals! And what’s more, guys and girls…. the apartment of Daddy with poor, poor kitty…. was surrounded by gallons and gallons of pouring water. Apparently the water was all coming from the above apartment on the Second Floor and was pouring down, like a magnificent and gusting waterfall, right into poor Daddy’s and poor kitty’s apartment. One firewoman saw me and yelled to either get out of the building or to stay in my apartment. I went right back into my apartment and firmly volunteered to stay solidly and stoically with my Princess Twinkles, my cat, until things calmed down… if it ever decided to calm down. I pulled my curtains widely aside, closed my windows, got dressed, drank my tea, fed my kitty, did all my usual morning knick-knacks and gaped at everything through my windows. I live on the ground floor of my building and this was truly like watching a very exciting show on TV but it was all very real and not Hollywood.
Eventually everything did calm down, sort of. They had still to find the person who had set the fire and then ran off and who lived in that burned apartment on the Second Floor and right above poor kitty’s and Daddy’s apartment. The police and the manager of the building did finally find the poor confused and frightened fellow and talked to him very firmly but gently. A nice man he was but he was mentally very disturbed and they asked him why he had done what he had done? He had lit a cigarette, put it near his curtains, ran off and since it hadn’t rained for days and weeks and years….. everything just lit up like a raging and gigantic Christmas tree. The manager had to get the Emergency Clean Up Team to clean the burned apartment and eventually also to clean poor kitty’s apartment. After some days we were all allowed to see how badly burned the above apartment on the Second Floor was. I went in one morning and was quite totally flabbergasted. The apartment was cleaned out but so truly bleak and black and had been severely burned through and through.
OK, now back to poor kitty and his supposedly caring Dad. Of course poor Daddy’s and poor and desolate kitty’s apartment was a living mess, at first! Like I said, no one thought much about poor kitty but me and maybe, just a little bit his, Daddy too. Outside my apartment there was a bench. During the night Daddy would stay in a hotel or motel but poor kitty was somewhere in that wet and smelly, with utter dampness, cold apartment. During the day Daddy would often be seen sitting outside on that bench… right outside my door. For the first time I spoke to him and, collecting all my courage up for kitty’s sake, I asked kitty’s Daddy, ‘Where is your poor cat?’
‘Oh, I think he’s under the bed somewhere. He’ll be fine.’
‘Ahhhh…. poor baby…. how scary for him!’
‘Oh, yeah yeah… he’ll be fine.’
That was the end of our long conversation….aside from the everyday ‘Hi’ and ‘Bye.’ However I continued to always ask him how poor kitty was doing. Daddy must have thought that I was a total idiot to worry so much about a simple cat… well, I didn’t really care. But from then on Daddy and I would say the usual fleeting ‘Hi’ and I always continued, very loyally and tactfully, to ask ‘the how are you?’ and then….‘So and … how is the kitty?’
Then one day, a few years later, after the fire and living on, Daddy had to go to a nursing home and left too and left poor Joey (kitty) behind in the cold and empty apartment. Sounds quite cruel, eh, and seems like the end of kitty’s life but wait…. no-no, wait! The real hero, the main maintenance man, lovingly grabbed kitty before they cleaned, again, the place and brought him to a neighbor’s apartment who lived a few doors down the hall and in the same building. Well, little me, happened to be a good friend of this neighbor….. and as neighbor already had a cat of his own….. I said, ‘Well, if my Princess Twinkles ever passes away then I will gladly take kitty into my home and then he will be my kitty… OK?’ Neighbor was very pleased with this idea but little did neighbor know how fond he would become of this kitty.
Joey (kitty) lived happily with neighbor and neighbor’s cat, Cleo. But Cleo was sure not happy at all about having kitty around, oh no! Poor Cleo, wherever kitty had sat on, Cleo would then never sit there. In the end poor Cleo was made to reside in the corner of neighbor’s apartment while King Kitty (kitty), no longer shy, roamed happily in neighbor’s the apartment. Luckily for Cleo, I told good neighbor to put an end to this… as this was really Cleo’s apartment and not King Kitty!
Not at all knowing or guessing or what awaited me, the true and sad day had really arrived. My darling, darling Princess Twinkles became very sick and my heart throbbed with endless sadness and grief for her. I did everything for her but as I was leaving for a short vacation, I sadly had to put her down in order to end her frightening misery. I could not bear to leave her in the care of dear friends, but strangers to her poor little soul, in a cold apartment without her loving Mama to care for her. My vet came to put her down and a dear friend came to support me and, with lighted candles and divine music, my lovely Princess Twinkles was put down to a sweet and everlasting sleep. It was so very sad to leave my angel cat behind. But she is always with me.
I was touched that so many people were on the alert to get me another cat but lucky kitty (Joey) was on the top of the list of cats when I was to return from my short vacation. When I returned from my trip… I tidied up my apartment with a light and excited heart and in came good neighbor with kitty in his arms. Neighbor had tears in his eyes… as he had grown so fond of kitty but kind neighbor knew that kitty was now officially my cat.
It took six month for kitty to get used to me and I to him. But after those six months had gone by he began to love his new home, his new basket, his new food, his crystal clear and clean water, his clean litter box and most of all, his loving owner. Oh yes… and a new vet who called him Big Guy. It was around this time that I began to think of giving him a brand new name … as he was getting a brand new life. I thought and thought and looked at him saying, ‘OK honey, now what should I call you, eh?’ Suddenly a bright light popped into my mind and I thought, ‘Mr. Kitty…. Yes that’s it… your new name shall be Mr. Kitty!’
Mr. Kitty and I have bonded tremendously well together. Our love is deep, profound and truly sincere. There is absolutely no talk, whatsoever, of us getting a divorce or dwelling on having a separation. If a problem should ever erupt… we always manage to solve this rapidly, quietly and, without screaming and yelling, or slamming doors. There is definitely no bickering ever, he always loves me even if I wear my raggiest pants and shirt and I simply adore him and would die if I lost him. Yes we are true survival sweethearts and will stick, like honey and glue and through wind and rain, together for all eternity.