Barnabas Monkeypants

In the span of a couple months two summers ago, two of our cats (Betty and Sonja) had to be put to sleep. Francis, our third cat, was lonely, and we felt that it was our duty to find him a new friend, to help him stay young and spry.

So we went down the street to a local no-kill shelter, Felines, Inc. This old graystone was two floors full of cat of all ages. We didn’t want to adopt an older cat for fear it would dominate Frank, and we didn’t necessarily want a kitten, because they always get adopted, and we wanted to maybe take one home that wasn’t a slam dunk.

Kristen and I start walking around the place, petting various cats, and one of the volunteers was there with us pointing out the various personality traits of each animal. This one was surly. This one needs to be an only cat. This one is on its last legs. There were cats there that, she admitted, were lifers, that were going to live at the shelter until they died.

Kristen fancied this furry gray cat that purred when she scratched him behind his ears, but he seemed quite indifferent to me. There was a tortoise-colored one that I liked, but Kristen thought that she was too old.

All the time that we were looking at different animals, this one, youngish black and white male cat kept on following us. He’d run circles around our feet, rub up against our legs, and prance on his tippy-toes when we reached down to pet him.

He was full of energy, and he was wonderful.

“He’s the one I want,” I told Kristen. (An aside: since Frank, Betty, and Sonja were all brought into the marriage by me, Kristen said that she was going to pick out the next animal. Uh… not so fast, woman.)

“He is cute,” she said. (And he was.)

“We’ll take him,” I told the woman.

Not so fast. You see, this cat — whose markings on his nose made him look like Jimmy Durante — was dropped off a few weeks earlier with his sister, and they wanted the two of them to be kept together. “Where is she?” Kristen asked.

“In here.”

“Here” was a cupboard above a sink where a small, furry cat was huddled. She was afraid of everything, especially some of the other more agressive cats. (They weren’t mean or nasty — just overly playful.) So the staff made up a small bed for her there and she was happy. Kristen picked her up, and the small cat curled up in the crook of her arm.

So we paid the adoption fee and took them both home. We named them Cecil and Georgia (for no specific reason), and after a few weeks of all of us getting to know each other, we’ve been a happy family.

Why am I writing this now? Because when we brought these two animals home with us lo those months ago, we both assumed that it was two cats. How wrong we were. One was a cat: Georgia. She’s sweet and loving and although she doesn’t always clean her butt as much as we’d like, she’s all feline.

The other, however, is a dog. There’s no doubt about it. Cecil does not run or prance or even scamper down the hallway. He bounds. Cecil will pick things up in his mouth, and run off with them. And most of all, he lets Henry beat him up.

Most cats I’ve known do not do well with babies and young children. But while Cecil doesn’t love Henry (as Henry certainly loves Cecil), he puts up with him. He lets Henry pull on his fur and tug at his tail and even (yuck) put his paw in his mouth. (That one was my fault. I was a bit lax on stopping that from happening, and it was only in there for a second or two.)

Surprisingly, Cecil was even okay with Henry starting to crawl. He was spooked a bit at first, but only for a moment. (He was spooked even more when Henry finally got into second gear, if you know what I mean, but that too was all in stride.) This is what dogs do, people. Not cats.

I still want a dog (a Bernese mountain dog, to be precise) and I’m sure Henry will want one too, but for now, Cecil will do just fine.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Barnabas, Kitties. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.