Leslie sent in this very sweet non-adoption adoption story, and since TaMara will be super busy for the next month or so, TaMara thought I should post it.
TaMara said that was a lot like she got her first cat, so I told her the story of how I got my first cat. I ended my story with this:
So maybe we all have the same origin story with cats, and just the details are different?
And we both had the same thought – maybe a Kitty Origin Stories thread would be just the thing for Balloon Juice.
Here’s mine: My Kitty Soulmate, Quiver:
For me, it was the cat who wondered in when I worked at the University. I was moved to a big warehouse building out in the country for a few months while they did some repairs to my office on campus.
I should start by saying that I had never been a cat person, though if I loved you, then of course I loved your cat. But that was the extent of it.
I returned to work after a couple of days off, and there was a cat in the office. They had named him Quiver, because of a funky thing he did with his tail. It was fall, and he visited us every day for weeks. In the week before Thanksgiving, I kept asking the top boss if we could bring him in for the 4-day weekend that was Thanksgiving – because it was getting really cold outside. She finally relented!
All of us agreed we would share in the food, the feeding, the cost of the litter box, cleaning the litter box… As soon as we put the litter box down, he used it, so we were in good shape.
But pretty soon I was the only one feeding him, the only one making sure he had fresh water in his bowl, the only one cleaning the litter box, the only one buying his food. I didn’t mind.
He started hanging out in my office most of the time, so of course I had to buy him a little cat bed for my “visitors” chair. And he needed a toy, for sure. And a brush, he had to be brushed! For treats, I brought in some cream.
I was usually the first one into the office every morning, and I would say “where’s Quiver” as I unlocked the door. I knew how much I loved him the day I caught him absolutely racing down the long hallway to get to me in the morning.
Then one night there was a loud clap of thunder just as the night janitor opened the door to clean, and Quiver bolted out the door. (The janitor felt terrible and left us a note.) It was cold and rainy and he was nowhere to be found. I was beside myself. Inconsolable. I drove around looking for him everywhere, in the rain, stopping at all the farms where I saw a human. It rained for 2 days straight.
After a couple of days, I had all but given up on ever finding him. Then one of the guys spotted him, soaking wet, hiding under a bush. He snagged Quiver and immediately brought him to me.
At that point, it was obvious to everyone that he was my cat. He was soaking wet and I’m wearing my good work clothes, but I couldn’t care less. I hugged him and toweled him dry and hugged him some more and held him until he was dry. And then held him some more!
When I finally got to move back to my office on campus, I asked if I could take Quiver home with me, and they all said yes. I really don’t know what I would have done if they had said no!
My sweet, beautiful boy.
So maybe we all have the same origin story with cats, and just the details are different?
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1.
eclare
My kitty soulmate was Neko, and she wandered into my fenced backyard like she owned the place years ago. And that was it, I was hers. I have gotten most of my kitties that way, they just show up and stay. Same with my parents, I inherited their cat five years ago, and she was a stray that they took in.
When I finished college I went back to the parents’ house for a few months with my two cats. One day I walked in and my father tells me “your cat was outside so I let her in.” Well she wasn’t my cat so I chucked her out, she was back in the next day. After this happened 2 or 3 times I got the idea. I had that cat for 24 years.
My best all-time cat was one I found at a week old, rescued from dogs. I bottle fed her and wiped her butt with baby wipes to get her to pee/poop. After a week, her eyes opened and she became a real kitten. I would “wear” her around my neck like a scarf when I’d walk around the house or outdoors (a residual behavior from when she was super-young). Just an amazing, amazing cat.
I came home from work one day, and SWIMBO said, “guess what, we have cats!”.
She and her ex had Capra and Pablo, when they separated, he demanded custody, he had them for about 2 years, then his new GF told him to get rid of them, so he did. Luckily, he didn’t abandon them outside, ( they were indoor cats) or dump them in a shelter. Instead, he dumped them and their stuff on an Air Canada flight to Vancouver, and called her when they were in the air.
Capra just climbed on top of me, curled up on my lap and went to sleep. After that, I was his new boy. At night, he would kiss me good night and sleep, curled up against the back of my knees. Pablo was not affectionate at all, to anybody, but he loved salads and pansy’s, so I shared salads with him and grew him pansy’s.
Before we married, my wife and her roommate found an orange cat living under the porch of their rented house. An orange cat with no claws, front or back, and only one visible fang. They would put out water and scraps for “Kai Kitty,” as they named the cat. Two falls later, my wife and I moved in together a few miles away, and sure enough, Kai Kitty showed up on our front porch just as winter was setting in, scruffier than usual with a patch of necrotic tissue on his scalp with another cat’s fang stuck in it. We took Kai along through three more moves (grad students that we were), only to find out at one house that Kai was also being fed by neighbors a couple of streets over who thought he was their cat. But Kai followed us when we moved 10 blocks south, and stayed with us until he must have been 14 years old. Hard to beat a cat that doesn’t need a litterbox and can fend for himself.
Champ came to us because my son’s ex-girlfriend knew he wanted a cat, and her mom, who worked ata vet, had a friend whose husband (still with me?) worked in a car repair shop that had adopted an adult cat, George, a little while back.
George turned out to be short for Georgina, and in due course she produced her litter–which the mechanics cared for until they grew big enough to climb out of their box and get lost among the tools or the shop floor.
So they had to go, instantly. Ex GF called the spawn on a Thursday evening and asked us if we could take one of the kittens, sight unseen, the next day, answer yes or no right then.
We said yes, of course…and so this is who showed up less than 24 hours later:
When my ex and I separated she took one of our two cats. I was heartbroken. (Over the cat, as it happens.) So I was in the market (for A CAT) when I heard from a friend that a kitten had scooped up from the middle of an intersection in downtown San Diego, and had been taken to a vet. I was out the door. She was a black longhair, and spunky as all get out — immediately knocked EVERYTHING off the vet’s table in the examination room where we met. I took her away in the cardboard cat carrier they gave me, and inside of five minutes she had torn her way out, caromed around the car, and settled under the brake pedal. On the freeway. Not ideal.
We made it home. Scully was with me (and later, my wife, two other cats, and a dog) for 20 years almost to the day. Finally dementia knocked her so far down that I knew I had to take her in. The dread was awful; I doubt I slept the night before The Day. In the morning I found that she had died in her sleep. Her final gift to me.
I used to ride my bike about 10 miles to work. Near the end of the ride, I had to walk the bike across railroad tracks at a train station. One morning, I saw a kitten no more than two months old mewing under the passenger platform. What could I do? I couldn’t bring a kitten to work with me. So guiltily I rode on and said to myself, well, if she’s still there at 4:30 this afternoon, I’ll take her home.
Here’s mine. I posted a version of this lat November when Sonny passed but it was in a mostly dead thread.
It was the fall of 2007. We had purchased a cabin near the WV, MD and PA border, very close to my favorite whitewater river, the Upper Youghiogheny (Yough). I was at the cabin by myself for a couple of days for the last whitewater releases of the season, one on the Upper Yough Saturday and the Savage on Sunday.
I drove to the put in with my kayak for the Upper Yough where I would meet some friends. It was yet early so there were not many people at the gravel parking lot. The lot was in a mowed field, separated from the river by a 30-40 ft buffer zone of trees. When I stepped out of the car I immediately heard a loud and persistent meowing, so exaggerated that I asked my friend “Is that a catbird?” “No, it’s a real cat” he said and pointed to an adorable golden kitten with long fur that was running up to the people in the field. He would shy away from quick moves but would run to outstretched hands, rubbing into them accepting petting and purring and loudly meowing again as they moved away. I went over myself to the kitten and he greedily accepted my pets and scritches. I was very conflicted, it was an adorable kitty, obviously abandoned, but I was 6 hours away from home and we had only recently had dropped to only having 3 cats. I was sure someone would rescue this cutie but everyone I asked, “Want a kitten?” would give a little smile, some excuse and walked away.
My group was putting on the river and it was time for me to join them. I forgot about the kitty as I was soon occupied by the class IV rapids. It was a wonderful time on the river but once we got to the calmer waters before the takeout my thoughts went back to the little guy. Once off the river and changed and loaded my friend drove me back to the put in to get my car. I was rather alarmed as we approached to see several dogs playing in the field loose. I anxiously walked back into the wooded buffer zone and called “kitty, kitty!” and heard an answering meow from above. He was on a branch 15 feet above the ground. I wasn’t sure what to do. I had a commitment to help some folks down the Savage river, an hour away, the next day and was going home from there. I didn’t want to leave a strange kitten in my car for hours while I was on the river nor did I want to leave him alone in our cabin. I knew I should also check with my wife before I did anything. Nevertheless I told the kitty “Wait here, I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon.”
That evening I called my wife and told her about the kitten. She said to bring him home. I began to regret that I didn’t bring the kitty to the cabin with me.
The next morning I closed up the cabin, grabbed an empty Rubbermaid storage box, loaded my gear and went to the Savage river, 45 min in the opposite direction from the upper Yough. Again I had a great day, said goodbye to my friends and drove back to the Upper Yough put in, stopping in Friendsville along the way to pick up a packet cat food.
The put in was deserted. The day before was the last release of the summer season so chances for another potential rescuer were pretty low. I walked into the woods with the box and the food and called for the kitty. He bounded out from the underbrush and greeted me warmly as I caressed him. I opened the cat food packet and he started wolfing it down. I waited until he had the last morsel in his mouth when I grabbed him, put him in the box and put on the lid. I expected to hear loud cries and feel some thrashing around but it was dead quiet. I took the box back to the car and placed the box on the seat next to me.
Before I left however a friend pulled into the parking lot to say hello. It was Paula, one of the kindest persons I have ever met. I told her about the kitten and gave her a quick peek and the golden kitten. I told her of my surprise he didn’t put up a fuss about being in the box and she laughed “That kitty knows he just hit the lottery!”. I bade farewell and started the long drive home. I kept the lid open far enough so I could reach in while driving to stroke the little boy. I decided his name would be Sonny. Sonny boy.
He was very quiet and well behaved on the six hour drive. I only stopped once for gas and restroom. Finally, when I pulled into my driveway and turned off the engine I heard soft purring coming from the box.
Sonny filled our lives with joy for the 15 years he was with us. He was never a lap cat but he loved to sit with his family. He really was like a little boy in that he was very talkative, asking for treats, to be petted and to be let outside or in. When he would come in he would meow a hello to us and stand until we gave him a welcome in scritch. When we wouldn’t let him out because it was too late he’d meow the feline equivalent of “mean mommy (or daddy) and run into the bedroom to sulk. But he always came back out to sit with us soon. If he was outside when we came home he would run off the porch and come over to greet us as soon as he saw the car.
Our legendary cat, Toots, came to us via a Chicago record store in 1978. I was walking down Clark St. near Wrightwood when I saw a sign in a record store advertising “free kittens.” Of course, I couldn’t resist and I claimed Toots — sort of a Maine Coon mix — and together we hopped on a bus to join my wife and I and our original cat, Pumpkin, in our Lincoln Park apartment. Toots loved adventures and causing trouble. He once jumped onto a shelf, sending several pieces of valuable cut glass to the floor and a pile of useless shards. We later lived in Evanston, Ill. and I spotted him on a narrow ledge of a sixth floor apartment with nowhere to go, having squeezed out of a screened window. I rushed up and rescued him. He later broke a leg, suffered from an infection that left an ear permanently disfigured and terrorized vets in three different counties. “This cat is mean,” was a sign posted outside a cage at one vet. But Toots was slavishly devoted to me, loved to curl up and lick my arm and I, in turned, returned the love to this ultimately skinny, sometimes surly cat who defied the odds and lived to be nearly 20.
Thanks for doing this Watergirl, things are so crazy here. My first cat story:
My apartment manager in LA – about a month after I moved there – asked if I could take care of this impossibly tiny kitten that showed up at her door – she already had two cats – and she would try to find her a home in the meantime. That tiny bundle slept in my hand that night and she wasn’t going anywhere after that. I named her BJ – (Barbara Jean). I knew nothing about cats and made many mistakes, but she always forgave me. She lived with me through three states, marriage, and divorce and I still miss her.
When we were first married we were cat-less until the day I saw what didn’t quite look like a dirt clump in the mud puddle next to where we parked our cars. It was not a dirt clump, it was a 6 week or so kitten, all dirty and sodden. I brought her in, dried her off and wrapped her in a warm towel on the bed, where she was snoozing when my husband came home. His only reaction was ” I see we have a cat.” An hour later I found her snoozing on his shoulder as he watched tv.
Emmy lived to be 18. Our first in a long line of cats who just appeared.
My John found our Cleo in our garage one chilly November day. She was about 3-4 weeks old, not at all weaned and as tiny a kitten I’d ever seen. All we had was some half and half so we watered that down some and dipped our fingers in it and let her suck it off. We got some towels and a shallow Rubber Maid bin and kept an eye for her mom for a day but she never came back. So we brought her in and I searched the internet to find out how to feed her. Ran to Petsmart and got some cat milk and a syringe to feed her and made a vet appointment. We keep her in our bonus room, away from the dogs because although Koda is fine with it, Lovey is absolutely not down with having a cat sister. But she has a huge room to herself with all the cat accoutrements one could desire. And that is where my office is when I work from home and also a couch and tv for when John and I don’t agree on viewing options, so I spend plenty of time with her. That was especially true during the COVID restrictions which was when we truly bonded and I became her human. She’s not a cuddly cat but she’s sweet with me. Neither of us had ever had a cat until now and, because of Cleo, I am now hooked on kitties.
Cute story about Kit. No special origin story, but I remember that special shinnying-up-the-leg time, and how the unfortunate brevity of it gives in return the graceful gliders. They’re well-named for happiness.
Like many of the other commentors’ stories, the cat chose where he wanted to be adopted…We already had 4 indoor/outdoor cats, and there was an orange cat that would sometimes visit us over a period of 18 months or so. Of course, we gave it some treats and hugs along the way! During the winter of 2013 he would jump up on the outside living room window ledge, and look in at the cozy scene: empty-nesters and our brood of four felines But surely it belonged to to neighbors down the street! He looked so well-nourished!
After an absence of 2 weeks, he showed up one Saturday night, moving slowly and gingerly, and not wanting any food. Also looking scraggly and a little beat up. A visit to the ER patched him up, but also turned up a viral infection that took isolation, force feeding round the clock for several weeks, and several visits to the feline ophthalmologist. He was slowly accepted as part of the flock, and is now the only cat left in our house. Needless to say, spoiled rotten😏
Currently out only cat is Punkin, so called because she is was tiny when she came to us, and ate so much she became shaped like a pumpkin. Wife heard her mewing trapped in a culvert under a multiflora rose bramble, and worked her out of there. She was the size of a chipmunk. a tiny thing.
When we took her to our vet asap, we were told she was 6 months old and needed to be spayed asap, so that’s what we did. Then we fed her, and fed her, and she ate and ate. Still a hungry girl. We fed her pumpkin on her kibble for quite a while when they told us how obese she was. Now we just give her frequent little bits of kibble, Usually around 6 am she creeps into bed and demands scritches. Which she gets — all she needs. She’s a mostly black tortie, and is surprisingly affectionate., even at the vets.
One day years ago, I was walking through my house and glanced out the sliding doors onto the deck and there were KITTENS out there! A mama cat had three kittens and just brought them over. (There was a semi-feral colony in the woods behind my house.) They lived out there for a few months; I didn’t bring them inside because I had two house cats and the kittens didn’t have shots or anything. I fed them and sat out on the deck getting them used to people and being picked up. My sister and I were going to take them all – I’d take two and she’d take one and Mama. But when the day came to take Mama to the vet to get fixed, she just vanished and was never seen again. I called them the Woodpile Kittens because I had a pile of cord wood back there and when they were startled they’d dart into the nooks and crannies of the wood pile. The last two of the kittens just died of old age a couple years ago.
This is reminding me of a classic Twitter thread from a few months ago, about how dog rescues involve applications, interviews etc, and cat people find their cats “in the trash.”
Nothing so dramatic in our case. We have 3 cats, 2 from the Humane Society and one from a private cat adoption group. Scribbles is trying mightily to interfere as I type this (I was gone skiing all morning, you see.). They’re all adorable.
I think I’ve told this story before, about my current cat, Oscar, and his Mom, Jeannie, who died last year. But here it is in more detail.
In Spring 2008, a longish haired grey kitty appeared on my doorstep. A girl cat, skinny and hungry. I had an elderly housecat (Ariel, grey tabby) at the time, and was not contemplating acquiring more cats until she had passed. But no animal has ever come hungry to my house and been turned away, so I put food out for the little gray girl. She kept showing up every day.
The townhouse complex I live in is kitty paradise: our huge parking lot is between us and the main drag, so the traffic is kept to a distance. The place is landscaped with paths and open areas, bounded by trees. There is a greenbelt on the eastern edge of the property; beyond that, a cemetery. Many, many places for a cat to lurk, hunt and sleep.
On the other side of the open ground between me and the across-the-lawn units was a big old tree whose large root system was entwined with an overgrown juniper hedge. The reason I mention this is, the root system and hedge formed a cozy and defensible “cave,” formed by roots and brambles. I’m pretty sure Little Miss Gray called that her home.
So I kept feeding her, and I started to chat with my neighbors about her. Turns out we were all feeding her.
So maybe a month after she first turned up, the neighbors and I again check in with each other to note that, despite everyone feeding her, Miss Gray is not getting fat. Miss Gray is getting round. Rounder and rounder. We all start putting more food out for her, since she’s eating for >1.
She vanishes one day, and we all are worried. She turns back up a few days later, skinny once more.
We all had one question: Where are your babies??
Well, we had to wait until they were about a month old before she brought them out (probably from Root Cave): three Siamese-colored fluffballs, and one black non-fluff.
(There was also at the time a giant seal-point Himalaya cat hanging around. He was rough, tough and scruffy. He allegedly belonged to someone in the next complex over, though we were never sure. I am quite sure, however, that he was the daddy of this batch.)
So, we now had a whole family to take care of. More food for Miss Gray, now called MamaCat. Quiet debates among the humans on next steps. I’m the one who took her in to be fixed, as soon as the kids were weaned and eating solids. And that’s when she got her own name, at the vet: Jean Gray, forever called Jeannie thereafter.
The black kitten disappeared soon after that, probably gotten by a coyote or raccoon. (Jeannie’s hatred of raccoons was lifelong and fierce: With my own eyes, I saw her square up to a raccoon and swat it repeatedly across the face until it backed down. Even into old age, she would growl, hiss, spit and throw herself against the front door if a raccoon dared to appear on the porch.)
Two of the Siamese fluffballs got adopted out. Nobody wanted to make a move after that. There was the last kitten, that was easy. But everyone would take Jeannie “if no else one will.” I thought that was a horrible attitude to such a devoted, brave mama (who, BTW, was also affectionate as the day is long) so I took Jeannie and the last kitten…who I named Oscar, because even as a baby he was fearless and pugnacious.
Ariel overlapped them for about another year, before old age and failing kidneys meant I had to take her on that last ride to the vet.
Jeannie lived to age 15, when cancer got her. I still grieve for her. Oscar is still with me, and hopefully will be for many years. He’s not as affectionate as Jeannie, who would be in my lap the instant I sat down and who slept snuggled up to me: any lovies given are very much on his terms; but he is in his way very much a sweetie pie.
My first feline was an eight week old stray chocolate point Siamese I found at my doorstep, meowing like crazy. Took him in and fed him some milk and tuna, and then he fell asleep on my lap. He had a big purr box, and when I’d scratch him under his chin, he’d smile a little and show his fangs. Later, I went next door to ask the neighbor if she was missing a kitten. She told me she found him after work in a downtown parking lot, and brought him home. She was not planning on keeping him and asked if I wanted him. His name was Toronaga Fang.
My cat Rutger had passed and I thought I could live without a cat for a while. Turns out that was all of 2 months. I went to the shelter and toured the cages. In one was a black kitten all by himself, playing with a little ball attached to the cage with a string. When he saw me he stopped, stood up, gripped the horizontal bars and peered at me. I took him out for a visit and he started playing with my earrings while purring. LOUDLY! Game over! I named him HellBoy! and he was smart, affectionate, and totally tuned in to me. We had 13 good years. It hurt so much to lose him.
Schrodinger was the first cat I looked at. He was a mackerel tabby with a heart-shaped white patch at the base of his throat, sitting in a cage at PetSmart along with his brother and sister. He was calm enough when we took him out of the cage and I handed him to my friend who came with me to look at baby kitties. Then I saw a brief flash of Heisenberg’s gorgeous golden-green eyes and his silver tabby coat, pulled him out, and he ran up my arm, around my neck, and sat on my head. He had to come home, too. I still feel bad about leaving their sister behind, but I only wanted 2 and Heisenberg and Schrodinger were them. I got a terrible case of the flu within a few days of bringing home the kitty brothers and they stood watch over me the whole time, one one the bed with me, the other on the floor. Four months old and those guys knew.
A few months later, I was in another PetSmart buying food and litter and came across a scared, withdrawn little dilute tortie kitten, around 11 months old. When they handed her to me, she curled tightly around my arm and shoulder, started to drool, and purred so violently and loudly I thought the rafters would shake. Needless to say, she came home with me, too. If there is such a thing as a familiar creature, Manya would be mine.
Then we lost Schrodinger to lymphoma (FUCK CANCER) and after almost a year, Heisenberg still walked over to his brother’s favorite spots, stood there, and looked expectantly at me, demanding answers about his brother. 💔
Then one day, while at the vet for Manya’s annual checkup, I saw a tiny bebé whose eyes just opened the day before. Someone found him in their yard, waited and waited for mama to return, and when she didn’t, they brought the little foundling into the vet’s office for fostering. I brought Asimov home at just over 5 weeks old so the big kids could teach him how to be a cat. Manya literally cried when I brought him home (she made a weird noise and I saw tears 😥), but Heisenberg was SO excited to get a baby.
Fast forward to today, and Manya is still displeased with the interloper, but she tolerates him. Heisenberg and Asimov love each other.
Meanwhile, Asimov has filled Schrodinger’s role as my bed kitty and my boyfriend is happy because he was always wanted a snuggle buddy and now he has one. Each cat is special and unique and we love them all.
Thank you for this thread. I needed some happy, cleansing tears.
Boy do I ever have stories, but they will have to wait for another day as I’m up to my elbows in other stuff. I will soon be dragging one of those things here to get some opinions but right now I’m on a break from rebuilding our garden boxes. In February! Shit be blooming here in southern Oregon already.
Keep this as a feature and when I have the time I will tell some tales about some tails…
Not my cat acquisition story, but my Mad Friend Norman was out cycling one day when he saw a toolbox sitting in a swampy field some distance from the road. It wasn’t a toolbox, it turned out to be a pet carrier complete with installed cat. Someone had made great efforts to dump this cat, a small young longhair tuxedo tom.
Norman took the cat home. He already had a couple of dogs, the cat would stick around or leave, he didn’t care. He wasn’t keeping it but he wouldn’t make it go away either. He wouldn’t give it a name although he did at one time think about Microwave, as in Microwave the cat. Norman has a very strange sense of humour. The cat ate biscuit dog food and scraps but generally fed itself elsewhere. Its attempts to steal food from the kitchen table and our plates were usually dissuaded by a fork-stab but that didn’t stop The Claw from making its stealthy appearance every now and then regardless.
Norman soon began to suspect that the previous owners of the cat carrier had their reasons to dump this cat a long way from civilisation — think The Omen or The Thing if you want a cinematic reason. The Shining might also be appropriate.
The cat grew up but not by much, it maybe weighed three kilos as an adult and half of that was long hair. It spent most of its time outside slaughtering any wildlife it could get its claws on. Its signature trick was to climb a small tree and leap out at pigeons that flew by. We once observed it stalking a peacock on the nearby castle grounds but nothing came of that, we think. We did get a regular donation of three-legged mice presented to us, training aids which could only run around in circles. We think it was very disappointed in us. The farmhouse had rats, the key word “had”. I encountered the results of the cat’s depredations one night, staggering to the toilet in the dark. My foot got entangled in… “something”. When I checked via torchlight it turned out to be rat gut. Someone (no names, no pack drill) had nibbled the middle of a rat so the head and tail section were still connected by the stringy rat guts.
Smart little bugger — when it came home at night after a happy day outside committing genocide on the local biosphere it would loom out of the darkness at the kitchen window and bang on it with a gore-stained paw to attract our attention. This would be our cue to go and open the door to let it in.
Norman never did give the cat a name. Its grave is marked by a piece of whinstone grit with a question mark.
The majority of my cat origin stories are of the backyard visitor becoming part of the family or of friend desperate to find a home for a cat. Of the 3 we have now the backyard visitor applies to 2, Virgil & Peaseblossom.
The 3rd, Cobweb, was a variation on the theme. The house we were living in had a large Florida room (screened lanai) and Mrs kalkalal had seen some bluejays going beserk mugging something in the back garden and thought she’d a small cat running from them into a tin hut at the back of the yard. The hut was dilapidated, full of junk & spiders ( hence Cobweb). I took a look, and there hidden in a load of old boxes and junk, was a tiny kitten. She was far too scared to come out and looked about 5 or 6 weeks old, far too young & small to be on her own. I took to sitting in there every day with her , taking her food & water, tin hut, florida in august, she really needed the water ( I wasn’ t working at the time) . Didn’t want to leave the food when I wasn’t there, she was snack sized for a lot of critters) . I was planning to get her trusting enough to bring her in gently and after about 3 weeks she would get within a few feet of me. Then a hawk decided the back yard was a great hunting ground & took 2 pigeons in 2 days. So… while Mrs kalakal stood ready at the lanai door, I sat in the hut and at the right moment made a grab. She went beserk, biting, ripping her claws into my arm. I didn’t dare let her go, ran for the lanai, Mrs kalakal shut the door and I released her .She was zooming up and down the screens for about 1/2 an hour. She’s my little cuddle bug these days but at the time I needed antibiotics.
Mogadon was a variant on the can you find a home? I was working in a hospital at the time which had a lot of feral cats. Every so often the pest controller would put out baited cages, any they caught they’d put down. One of the ward sisters sneaked in one day with a kitten she’d sprung from a cage and what were we going to do with it? And so I went home with a new cat
I was single, Navy, and stationed on shore duty in the Orlando area when I got two kittens by the clever scheme of looking in the classifieds. They cost $5, said the ad. I went for one, and there was only one left, and they could play with each other while I was away… I wasn’t charged– that was just to filter out the unserious. As they grew I made a cat flap for them, and was amazed at how they would leave with me in the morning, and come back in when I came home, what with the heat. Then I found they were actually beating feet around the corner to an apartment with 3-4 cats. Those Navy people transferred up to Groton, CT, and in due course I followed. There was an available apt across the hall from them: serendipity! Ground floor with a porch rather than balcony, and feral cats, racoons, and woodchucks were in abundance. Neighbor and I screened in our porches, and the cats adapted to an indoor-only life.
Neighbors would watch the cats (often bringing them over for visits) especially when I was underway, but one long weekend I returned from a home visit to find a kitten in the apt. He had been hanging out near the dumpster and the neighbors stashed him in my place “just until we find a good home.” Famous last words. The two female cats accepted this runty newcomer. He was laid-back; when he had peeing issues I brought him to the vet’s, and he sat calmly in the middle of the cat carrier, and in the waiting room sat on my knee among the dogs and cats. In the examining room I set him on the table and sat. The vet came in and saw me sitting there, no animal. A clink, he turns, and the kitten is on the second shelf checking out the bottles there. Just an quickly-caught UTI. When I married to a non-pet person (she tricked me!) the two older cats went to a shipmate who then transferred, never to be heard from again, and the kitten, still runty, was shopped around to my sister, then my new house-neighbor, and then across the street. He was indoor/outdoor by then, and still visited me until he passed away at a ripe old age.
Now all I have for an easy pet-fix is the three Great Danes newly moved in next door.
watergirl, when you say the cat quivers, do you mean his tail moves like a rattlesnake’s? when hungry or excited? because that’s EXACTLY what our catie does. it’s nice to know there are others out there that do that.
i posted catie’s origin story here a while back. we adopted her from sean casey animal rescue, the same place we got her older brother. she was a plague cat, we brought her into the family a good three days before the city shut down from covid.
There was an apartment building behind my home that a private college was renting to use as a student dormitory. I’d go by the place and sometimes I’d see the students petting this little black kitten. Sometimes the kitten would venture just outside the dorm’s front gate, so I’d get to pet her too and become acquainted.
Not long after, the college closed down the dorm. (It was a pretty rundown building, so I guess the dorm was a stopgap until they could find somewhere better to house the kids.) And not long after that, on Saturday the 3rd of Ramadhan, 2004, my mother passed away.
A week later, as I was going to get something for iftar, I saw the kitten again and stopped to say hello. When she saw me coming back from the Ramadhan bazaar, the little black kitten decided to take a chance on me and follow me back all the way home. And that’s how Bianca and I got together.
When I was a middle schooler, I was walking the woods on our farm in late fall, and heard a rustling in the underbrush. Out popped an emaciated, shivering little dove grey cat with white feet and a white blaze. She gave the most pitiful cry, and ran right up to me. I could see that her front paws were raw on the front and bottom, and I picked her up and put her inside my jacket and ran home.
Our farm vet made a trip to the house to check her out since she was so emaciated. She got some subQ fluids, he cleaned her poor little paws, and she settled in on my pillow next to my head, purring like crazy. The vet thought that she might have been trapped somewhere, since her paw injuries looked like abrasions from trying to claw her way out or in through an obstruction.
She was too weak and thin to schedule a spay just then, and he suggested that we bring her in to his office in about four weeks for a check up and to schedule her spay.
She recovered beautifully, and put on weight quickly – so quickly that we began to suspect that we might have a teencat mother on our hands. Sure enough – pregnant. She had her litter of little ones, we homed them, had her spayed, and she was my best buddy and constant companion for 17 years. She was with me through all the milestones of young life: losing my great grandmother, high school, first love, college, and my first day as a teacher. She was the best girl.
Shortly after I found her, we had posted flyers at the general store and the gas station and post office, since she was so sweet and people-focused that we worried she might be someone’s missing pet.
Nobody responded, so she got christened Zelda and settled in for good.
She loved to go for walks with me in the summer, and learned to walk on a leash. The second year she was with us, I was walking with her along the furthest line of our property. A small subdivision had been built a few years previously on what had been a neighboring farm.
A couple of kids, one around kindergarten age and one about 9 years old, came running up to the fence, yelling,”Friska! Friska!”
It turned out that their parents had gotten them a kitten, but didn’t spay her, and let her run loose during the day because they now “lived in the country”. When kitty came into heat and was spotted getting friendly with a stray Tom, the parents realized that she was likely pregnant, and dumped her in the woods, according to the kids. She found her way back, and spent days clawing at the doors trying to get in to her people, until the father started spraying her with a hose and throwing soda bottles at her until she finally stopped coming back. I was aghast. The kids were sobbing the whole time they were telling the story, and said that their parents hadn’t wanted to pay for a vet or to have to raise a litter of kittens. Their Friska was my Zelda. The kids had thought she was dead. Those poor kids. That poor kitty!
I told the kids that they could come and visit her if they wanted, and told them that I lived in the brick farmhouse down the road.
I went home and told my parents and my grandmother that I now knew where she had come from, and why nobody had come forward to claim her. They were all horrified, but my grandmother, an old guard Cat Lady, was utterly furious.
The next day, my grandmother and I were making lunch, and the doorbell rang. It was the kids’ mother, come to claim “her cat” , now that she was vetted and “spayed and not going to be a big problem again”.
My sweet little grandmother unloaded on that lady and sent her packing. Miss Zelda got to watch the whole event from her kitty bed in the living room. Sweet justice!
I have two kitty origin stories. One day, a friend of mine found a cat at a motel. He’d been left in one of the rooms, and the staff had put him outside. He was an adult cat, not a kitten, but he’d been there for days and whoever had left him there hadn’t come back for him. So she took him, but she already had two cats and knew they would not accept an addition.
So she called me, from the road, and I heard the kitty talking. And I knew, right at that moment, that he was mine. She brought him over, and that night he slept with me, and that was that. I named him Chaucer, and the two of us had many conversations over the years.
My other kitty came to me in the usual way, by the standards of this thread. One day I was on my way to work, and a tiny little kitten was toddling right down the middle of the street in front of my house. Just then, a pickup drove down the street, but fortunately the driver saw him and stopped. And the kitten ran right under the truck and wouldn’t come out.
Well, I obviously couldn’t leave him there. So I set my things on the hood of my car, went to the edge of the road, and did my best imitation of mama cat sounds. The kitten came running, talking at the top of his little lungs.
I took him inside, bathed him because he was filthy, and gave him some food. Despite his size, he had no problem chowing down. I thought about trying to find him a home, but we bonded in no time.
Both gone now, but both very sweet, affectionate cats. I miss them.
I have so many origin stories so I’ll talk about a friend who only has the one 😀 Thanksgiving week in a big apartment complex in a big city.Little gray cat playing in the landscaping by a side entrance.Kitty comes right over, meowing, pawing to be picked up.Put her back on her little patch of grass since we weren’t sure of her status.Next day we spot the kitty in the backyard.So did many other neighbors because a day later she was ensconced in the janitor’s office with donated blankets, toys, and food.Fliers posted and shelters contacted over the next week with no results.Building manager takes kitty to vet where it turns out she’s about a year old, spayed but not chipped.Building manager and myself convince friend to take kitty (not that much convincing was needed).That cat walked into the apartment like she had always been there…none of the usual curious sniffing and investigating.Made a beeline for the most comfy chair in the living room and jumped right up on it. This past Thanksgiving was her 10th “gotcha day” ❤️
One story: visiting the mother-in-law on her farm and what looks like a starved kitten runs up and starts rubbing on my shoe laces. This is in Kentucky and home is San Diego. Of course, we get a cat carrier and bold as brass fly her home with the cage on my lap. As long as I kept a hand on her she’s quiet and reassured. Walking through the airport, the meows are demanding that the hand of comfort be restored.
Two planes and roughly nine hours later, even the hand wasn’t enough. Increasingly urgent mews let us know the need for a litter box. Alas, two minutes from home and the battle was lost.
First time I had a female cat. A dark tortie we named Caramel and unbearably sweet. When we took her to the vet, we discover this four pound “kitten” is at least a year old and eating so much you could feel the kibble through her skin. The vet was so excited, she had three different kinds of worms, one of which the vet techs had never seen before and was it ok if he showed them?
Only one real problem in bringing her home: we had two mature toms, one at the sixteen pound mark. When presented with her, though, he stretches out a paw <bap! bap!> on the head….and apparently that was all he needed.
Caramel had one trait left from her rescue: truly enormous sneezing and trailing loogies that would tear plaster off the wall if we didn’t find it before it dried.
On a Saturday afternoon around the fall equinox in 1993, I was driving near Condon, Oregon looking for a plowed wheat field to borrow for a sculpture the following day, consisting of wooden stakes pounded into the ground every hour.
A few minutes before I found my spot, I saw a dead tuxedo kitten in the opposing lane. A dump truck I’d seen just prior suggested this had just happened.
Not finding what I was looking for here on Richmond Rd, I turned around.
When I got to the kitten, it was sitting up in the middle of the road, bent at an odd angle, shallow slow breathing, in a puddle of urine and diarrhea.
I stopped to move it to the roadside so it could die without the indignity and horror of getting squished. It was unaware of me until I picked it up scruffwise.
Sure that it had minutes to live, I put it in a small box, wished it peace, and drove off without much more thought.
That night I slept out, on a cot, in the field I’d found. I heard coyotes off and on, briefly thinking that’s likely where that dead kitten ended up.
Sunday morning I started my solar markings a bit after sunrise. Just after the 9am batch, I decided to go into town for food and a newspaper.
Passing Richmond Rd., I got curious.
The box was where I left it, now tipped on its side.
A foot or so away, there was that tuxedo kitten, clearly unaware that I was there. This time it was limp and unresponsive when I put it back in the box. I decided to take it into Condon to find a vet to put it to sleep.
The vet wasn’t home.
OK, I’ll keep the cat and bury it when it dies.
I put the box in the footwell of the front passenger seat and went on with my day, parked in the sunny field, reading the paper between flurries of activity. I didn’t think much about the cat, nor check on it, figuring nature would take its course soon enough.
A bit before 2pm, I was in the driver seat when the box wobbled.
Silently, eyes swollen shut, caked in dried goo, the kitten clawed its way onto the bench seat, very shakily took a few aimless steps.
I was motionless and puzzled, waiting for this spasm to sap the last life force from this doomed creature.
It took a step in my direction.
Then onto my thigh, still sightless and without a sound.
It clawed its way up my chest.
Now we were face to face.
Its right eye opened a crack, right paw extended and touched my cheek, and it started purring. Loudly.
Oh lord.
I put it back in the box and it promptly resumed the coma.
The kitten came back to consciousness a time or two more, but I was still sure it was a goner.
Driving back to Portland that night, it climbed into my lap and went to sleep, purring sometimes.
I dropped it off at the 24hr veterinary hospital.
They said he’d likely not make it. Internal injuries, and a likely skull fracture.
I left, sure I’d done the right thing, without any sense of attachment other than a feeling of intersection.
Wednesday morning, I phoned the hospital, curious to hear how the kitten checked out.
They referred me to the Pound.
“There’s nothing wrong with this fella. Come get him!”
At the time I was traveling for work more than I was home. A pet was out of the question.
I adopted the nameless male tuxedo intending to find him a home. Someone else’s home.
Everyone I asked insisted, “You HAVE to keep this cat!”
Reluctantly, I agreed, on condition that those who insisted become cat sitters.
For years, Kilo (he weighed 2.2 pounds when adopted) seemed initially disappointed when I came home because he preferred his cat sitters.
He was the most grateful soul, still touching my face with eye contact from time to time as he did that first Sunday.
Aww, probably a dead thread by now, but here goes. My daughter was about 12 and in middle school and attending an evening astronomy class a “cool teacher” conducted from time to time. We got back home with her and a friendly orange tabby cat was in our driveway, coming right up to us. He hung around. My husband doesn’t like animals, but my daughter was at the very tail end of being little and cute, so her “can we keep him?” was met with grudging agreement.
I told her that if we adopted him, she would have to feed and take care of him. Yeah, right.
She named him Fuzzle and he became my special pal. When I was recovering from breast cancer surgery he sat on me, but not anywhere where he would hurt. What a good little nurse. He was outgoing and sweet. We had him until he passed away from lymphoma (sob) in 2010.
No dramatic story here. When my now-husband and I moved in together, his Siamese, Jackie, was part of the deal. I was fine with it; I had kitties as a kid, and didn’t get any as an adult only because of my sometimes weird working hours and my penchant for taking several vacations per year. Jackie was the sweetest, best-tempered cat you ever met. She put up with moving numerous times with Wade, and with living in a hotel with us while our house remodeling was finished. At the hotel, she would take walks with me through the halls and in the parking lot (it was a huge lot that fronted on a freeway service drive, so I always accompanied her. When we were outside and I said, “Okay, time to go in”, she would turn around and follow me inside. She travelled with us by plane back East several times, and put up with the underseat box but complained when the plane started moving. I had no idea a cat could meow for two hours straight. Her favorite place in the evening was curled up next to my leg on the couch as I watched TV; she accepted me as her second human quickly. Jackie left us as a result of intestinal cancer at an unknown age (Wade didn’t remember when she acquired him), and we soon had another kitty, but I’ll leave our further adventures with kitties (we’ve had six since Jackie) for another thread.
We seem to be running a cat rescue here, so various cats are confined in different rooms until they’ve been vetted. Kiki, Mooshu and Oliver are in one room. As usual, all three bolted out when I went to feed them, but this time only two came back when the food was down. A quick look showed no sign of Mooshu, so I carried on feeding the rest of the Menagerie.
Mooshu turned up in my office, but now Kiki had gone missing. I found her in the bottom of a wardrobe, along with her new kittens. No count, no age, no nothing yet. Watch this space…
When I was growing up, we always had cats, never a dog, because my mother was a cat person. So when I thought I’d finished college finally, I started thinking about getting a cat. Not that I actually looked at the classifieds for one or anything. Anyway, I was working as a security guard, driving my beaten-up Pontiac Tempest around the facility and going into buildings to turn a key in a clock. But when I came out of one building, I heard this awful yowling coming from underneath my car. Omigod! I thought. I ran over a cat! I looked under the front of my car, didn’t see a cat. Looked under the back, didn’t see a cat. Went back around to the front, and this orange tuxedo kitten came sauntering out, yelling his head off but completely unhurt. So I picked up the little guy, who was 6-8 weeks old — he never told me his birthday — and he was purring like crazy. And I thought, OK now I have a cat. But I had to finish my shift before I dealt with a kitten, so I drove back to the security office, and not having a place to put him, placed him in a nearly empty filing cabinet drawer and shut it and finished my shift.
When I was done with my rounds, I returned to the office and opened the file cabinet, and he strolled out, still purring. And although I made a halfhearted effort to see whether anybody in the adjoining neighborhood had posted flyers about a missing kitten, I knew I had a new buddy, and I named him Cat 9 From Outer Space.
9 was a great cat. My roommate told me that when it was about time for me to get home from work every day, 9 would sit in the front window and watch for my car, then run to the entrance hall to greet me. For the last several years of his life, he would sleep curled around the top of my head. The yelling was a constant; he was a talkative little guy, who would scream like he was being disemboweled whenever he was disturbed. And he was the stubbornest animal I’ve ever known; once when I moved, he didn’t pee at all during the drive from St. Louis to Denver, while the other cats soiled themselves. I’ve had lots of cats since 9, but none of them has bonded to me like he did. He was a great kitty, until his kidneys gave out on him after he’d lived with me for 14 years and three long-distance moves.
The month before Halloween 2013, Tehya my Pretty Kitty developed a severe case of lung cancer and I didn’t realize it until it was too late the week before.
It had been two years since I lost Page my Silly Kitty to skin cancer, that Monday before Thanksgiving.
On Halloween night, sitting around my apartment complex – in an empty place – wondering where all the trick-or-treaters were, I hear this meowing. At the base of the stairs was this little kitten, clearly hungry, wanting attention and food and love.
With nothing else to do, I raced out to Publix for packets of cat food, paper plates to put ’em, and put the food out.
A trio of cats emerged from the bushes to partake, and before I knew it me and my neighbors had settled into taking care of two cats, the meowy kitten and an older (by a year) grey cat. Both of them were literally skin and bones. We fatted them up and they were content.
The black-and-white kitten quickly grew brave and learned to race up the stairs to my apartment, and finagled his/her way in past the door to check my place out and recognize I had cat toys still about, and got to wiggling about on the floor contented and purring.
After more than a month of doing this and finding out no one else had reported a missing kitten or twelve, of figuring out the poor things were most likely abandoned – ferals are NEVER this friendly – and in need of a home, noting I only had the budget for one cat to join me, I succumbed to the inevitable that the kitten I had nicknamed Wiggles was my cat, and took him/her today to the vet to proceed adopting it.
The nurses told me Wiggles was a girl cat.
Wiggles is more nickname than name. I needed a good girl cat name. The nurses suggested I get one from a book.
My smartphone has ebooks on it. I opened up my Nook reader and the first book up was by Neil Gaiman.
Her name is now Ocean. If you’ve read Neil’s book, you’d know why.
We’ve had many cats over the years but their stories are not that interesting–adopted them from shelters.
Once, we adopted one, a nice orange boy named Elmer, who turned out to have some sort of advanced kidney ailment and died just a month after we adopted him, so the shelter waived the adoption fee on the next one. That was Niobe, long gone now but still my favorite cat ever–a weird-looking little dilute tortie with tufts on her eyebrows and chin that made her look like an angry scottie dog. The shelter had just taken her in and was a bit uncertain about her personality, but she turned out to be both a hilarious pet with the usual tortitude, and a loyal friend.
Too many stories for one post, but Pickles was born under our house while we were traveling. Upon returning, we were mysteriously assaulted by fleas from the carpet. What? But the next day, when I started to mow the ignored yard, Mama cat removed, one by one, her kittens from our crawl space to the house across the street.
Later that winter, we returned from weekend trips to find a tortie on our porch three different times. The third time, we held the door open, and Pickles walked majestically in, tail held high.
She was one of the kittens born under our house that the cross-street idiots would feed but otherwise ignore, and was sensibly looking for a real home.
A little late to this thread, but I have to share our story. When we lived in Florida there were sizable stray cat colonies as college towns do. We used to walk our dog, Ruby around the apartment complex and one day a cat started following us around on our walks. Then she started staring at us through our front window. Then she started sitting on the roof of our car. Then she came in to live with us. Since she looked like our dog Ruby, we named her Ruby Jr. Here is a video I made at the time:
Then my wife Shelly reported another cat was coming out to see her when she walked Ruby. This cat was super friendly and snuggly, but he never came out for me. So I named him Snuggleupagus. He eventually started following me home. He was just a kitten! He was too friendly and naïve to live on the streets so we took him in. Turned out he had a heart condition. Here is a video I made when he was still a tough-as-nails street cat
eclare
My kitty soulmate was Neko, and she wandered into my fenced backyard like she owned the place years ago. And that was it, I was hers. I have gotten most of my kitties that way, they just show up and stay. Same with my parents, I inherited their cat five years ago, and she was a stray that they took in.
alquitti
When I finished college I went back to the parents’ house for a few months with my two cats. One day I walked in and my father tells me “your cat was outside so I let her in.” Well she wasn’t my cat so I chucked her out, she was back in the next day. After this happened 2 or 3 times I got the idea. I had that cat for 24 years.
Keith P.
My best all-time cat was one I found at a week old, rescued from dogs. I bottle fed her and wiped her butt with baby wipes to get her to pee/poop. After a week, her eyes opened and she became a real kitten. I would “wear” her around my neck like a scarf when I’d walk around the house or outdoors (a residual behavior from when she was super-young). Just an amazing, amazing cat.
TheOtherHank
This isn’t my cat story, but I watched this video a few weeks ago and it seems apt:
Hiker doesn’t want a kitten: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVp7zH3yCi0
Jay
I came home from work one day, and SWIMBO said, “guess what, we have cats!”.
She and her ex had Capra and Pablo, when they separated, he demanded custody, he had them for about 2 years, then his new GF told him to get rid of them, so he did. Luckily, he didn’t abandon them outside, ( they were indoor cats) or dump them in a shelter. Instead, he dumped them and their stuff on an Air Canada flight to Vancouver, and called her when they were in the air.
Capra just climbed on top of me, curled up on my lap and went to sleep. After that, I was his new boy. At night, he would kiss me good night and sleep, curled up against the back of my knees. Pablo was not affectionate at all, to anybody, but he loved salads and pansy’s, so I shared salads with him and grew him pansy’s.
phein63
Before we married, my wife and her roommate found an orange cat living under the porch of their rented house. An orange cat with no claws, front or back, and only one visible fang. They would put out water and scraps for “Kai Kitty,” as they named the cat. Two falls later, my wife and I moved in together a few miles away, and sure enough, Kai Kitty showed up on our front porch just as winter was setting in, scruffier than usual with a patch of necrotic tissue on his scalp with another cat’s fang stuck in it. We took Kai along through three more moves (grad students that we were), only to find out at one house that Kai was also being fed by neighbors a couple of streets over who thought he was their cat. But Kai followed us when we moved 10 blocks south, and stayed with us until he must have been 14 years old. Hard to beat a cat that doesn’t need a litterbox and can fend for himself.
Tom Levenson
Champ came to us because my son’s ex-girlfriend knew he wanted a cat, and her mom, who worked ata vet, had a friend whose husband (still with me?) worked in a car repair shop that had adopted an adult cat, George, a little while back.
George turned out to be short for Georgina, and in due course she produced her litter–which the mechanics cared for until they grew big enough to climb out of their box and get lost among the tools or the shop floor.
So they had to go, instantly. Ex GF called the spawn on a Thursday evening and asked us if we could take one of the kittens, sight unseen, the next day, answer yes or no right then.
We said yes, of course…and so this is who showed up less than 24 hours later:
Tom Levenson
@Tom Levenson: The rest, as they say, is history:
eclare
@Tom Levenson: Oh that photo! Adorable.
dexwood
@Tom Levenson: Cause of dexwood’s death? Cute overload.
Hungry Joe
When my ex and I separated she took one of our two cats. I was heartbroken. (Over the cat, as it happens.) So I was in the market (for A CAT) when I heard from a friend that a kitten had scooped up from the middle of an intersection in downtown San Diego, and had been taken to a vet. I was out the door. She was a black longhair, and spunky as all get out — immediately knocked EVERYTHING off the vet’s table in the examination room where we met. I took her away in the cardboard cat carrier they gave me, and inside of five minutes she had torn her way out, caromed around the car, and settled under the brake pedal. On the freeway. Not ideal.
We made it home. Scully was with me (and later, my wife, two other cats, and a dog) for 20 years almost to the day. Finally dementia knocked her so far down that I knew I had to take her in. The dread was awful; I doubt I slept the night before The Day. In the morning I found that she had died in her sleep. Her final gift to me.
hells littlest angel
I used to ride my bike about 10 miles to work. Near the end of the ride, I had to walk the bike across railroad tracks at a train station. One morning, I saw a kitten no more than two months old mewing under the passenger platform. What could I do? I couldn’t bring a kitten to work with me. So guiltily I rode on and said to myself, well, if she’s still there at 4:30 this afternoon, I’ll take her home.
We had 15 good years together. RIP Frankie.
cintibud
Here’s mine. I posted a version of this lat November when Sonny passed but it was in a mostly dead thread.
It was the fall of 2007. We had purchased a cabin near the WV, MD and PA border, very close to my favorite whitewater river, the Upper Youghiogheny (Yough). I was at the cabin by myself for a couple of days for the last whitewater releases of the season, one on the Upper Yough Saturday and the Savage on Sunday.
I drove to the put in with my kayak for the Upper Yough where I would meet some friends. It was yet early so there were not many people at the gravel parking lot. The lot was in a mowed field, separated from the river by a 30-40 ft buffer zone of trees. When I stepped out of the car I immediately heard a loud and persistent meowing, so exaggerated that I asked my friend “Is that a catbird?” “No, it’s a real cat” he said and pointed to an adorable golden kitten with long fur that was running up to the people in the field. He would shy away from quick moves but would run to outstretched hands, rubbing into them accepting petting and purring and loudly meowing again as they moved away. I went over myself to the kitten and he greedily accepted my pets and scritches. I was very conflicted, it was an adorable kitty, obviously abandoned, but I was 6 hours away from home and we had only recently had dropped to only having 3 cats. I was sure someone would rescue this cutie but everyone I asked, “Want a kitten?” would give a little smile, some excuse and walked away.
My group was putting on the river and it was time for me to join them. I forgot about the kitty as I was soon occupied by the class IV rapids. It was a wonderful time on the river but once we got to the calmer waters before the takeout my thoughts went back to the little guy. Once off the river and changed and loaded my friend drove me back to the put in to get my car. I was rather alarmed as we approached to see several dogs playing in the field loose. I anxiously walked back into the wooded buffer zone and called “kitty, kitty!” and heard an answering meow from above. He was on a branch 15 feet above the ground. I wasn’t sure what to do. I had a commitment to help some folks down the Savage river, an hour away, the next day and was going home from there. I didn’t want to leave a strange kitten in my car for hours while I was on the river nor did I want to leave him alone in our cabin. I knew I should also check with my wife before I did anything. Nevertheless I told the kitty “Wait here, I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon.”
That evening I called my wife and told her about the kitten. She said to bring him home. I began to regret that I didn’t bring the kitty to the cabin with me.
The next morning I closed up the cabin, grabbed an empty Rubbermaid storage box, loaded my gear and went to the Savage river, 45 min in the opposite direction from the upper Yough. Again I had a great day, said goodbye to my friends and drove back to the Upper Yough put in, stopping in Friendsville along the way to pick up a packet cat food.
The put in was deserted. The day before was the last release of the summer season so chances for another potential rescuer were pretty low. I walked into the woods with the box and the food and called for the kitty. He bounded out from the underbrush and greeted me warmly as I caressed him. I opened the cat food packet and he started wolfing it down. I waited until he had the last morsel in his mouth when I grabbed him, put him in the box and put on the lid. I expected to hear loud cries and feel some thrashing around but it was dead quiet. I took the box back to the car and placed the box on the seat next to me.
Before I left however a friend pulled into the parking lot to say hello. It was Paula, one of the kindest persons I have ever met. I told her about the kitten and gave her a quick peek and the golden kitten. I told her of my surprise he didn’t put up a fuss about being in the box and she laughed “That kitty knows he just hit the lottery!”. I bade farewell and started the long drive home. I kept the lid open far enough so I could reach in while driving to stroke the little boy. I decided his name would be Sonny. Sonny boy.
He was very quiet and well behaved on the six hour drive. I only stopped once for gas and restroom. Finally, when I pulled into my driveway and turned off the engine I heard soft purring coming from the box.
Sonny filled our lives with joy for the 15 years he was with us. He was never a lap cat but he loved to sit with his family. He really was like a little boy in that he was very talkative, asking for treats, to be petted and to be let outside or in. When he would come in he would meow a hello to us and stand until we gave him a welcome in scritch. When we wouldn’t let him out because it was too late he’d meow the feline equivalent of “mean mommy (or daddy) and run into the bedroom to sulk. But he always came back out to sit with us soon. If he was outside when we came home he would run off the porch and come over to greet us as soon as he saw the car.
I could go on and on. We still miss him terribly.
Yutsano
@Tom Levenson: I see Tikka’s bare tolerance for the invasive spawn is still quite strong!
jackmac
Our legendary cat, Toots, came to us via a Chicago record store in 1978. I was walking down Clark St. near Wrightwood when I saw a sign in a record store advertising “free kittens.” Of course, I couldn’t resist and I claimed Toots — sort of a Maine Coon mix — and together we hopped on a bus to join my wife and I and our original cat, Pumpkin, in our Lincoln Park apartment. Toots loved adventures and causing trouble. He once jumped onto a shelf, sending several pieces of valuable cut glass to the floor and a pile of useless shards. We later lived in Evanston, Ill. and I spotted him on a narrow ledge of a sixth floor apartment with nowhere to go, having squeezed out of a screened window. I rushed up and rescued him. He later broke a leg, suffered from an infection that left an ear permanently disfigured and terrorized vets in three different counties. “This cat is mean,” was a sign posted outside a cage at one vet. But Toots was slavishly devoted to me, loved to curl up and lick my arm and I, in turned, returned the love to this ultimately skinny, sometimes surly cat who defied the odds and lived to be nearly 20.
TaMara
Thanks for doing this Watergirl, things are so crazy here. My first cat story:
My apartment manager in LA – about a month after I moved there – asked if I could take care of this impossibly tiny kitten that showed up at her door – she already had two cats – and she would try to find her a home in the meantime. That tiny bundle slept in my hand that night and she wasn’t going anywhere after that. I named her BJ – (Barbara Jean). I knew nothing about cats and made many mistakes, but she always forgave me. She lived with me through three states, marriage, and divorce and I still miss her.
MagdaInBlack
When we were first married we were cat-less until the day I saw what didn’t quite look like a dirt clump in the mud puddle next to where we parked our cars. It was not a dirt clump, it was a 6 week or so kitten, all dirty and sodden. I brought her in, dried her off and wrapped her in a warm towel on the bed, where she was snoozing when my husband came home. His only reaction was ” I see we have a cat.” An hour later I found her snoozing on his shoulder as he watched tv.
Emmy lived to be 18. Our first in a long line of cats who just appeared.
geg6
My John found our Cleo in our garage one chilly November day. She was about 3-4 weeks old, not at all weaned and as tiny a kitten I’d ever seen. All we had was some half and half so we watered that down some and dipped our fingers in it and let her suck it off. We got some towels and a shallow Rubber Maid bin and kept an eye for her mom for a day but she never came back. So we brought her in and I searched the internet to find out how to feed her. Ran to Petsmart and got some cat milk and a syringe to feed her and made a vet appointment. We keep her in our bonus room, away from the dogs because although Koda is fine with it, Lovey is absolutely not down with having a cat sister. But she has a huge room to herself with all the cat accoutrements one could desire. And that is where my office is when I work from home and also a couch and tv for when John and I don’t agree on viewing options, so I spend plenty of time with her. That was especially true during the COVID restrictions which was when we truly bonded and I became her human. She’s not a cuddly cat but she’s sweet with me. Neither of us had ever had a cat until now and, because of Cleo, I am now hooked on kitties.
prostratedragon
Cute story about Kit. No special origin story, but I remember that special shinnying-up-the-leg time, and how the unfortunate brevity of it gives in return the graceful gliders. They’re well-named for happiness.
OHJo
Like many of the other commentors’ stories, the cat chose where he wanted to be adopted…We already had 4 indoor/outdoor cats, and there was an orange cat that would sometimes visit us over a period of 18 months or so. Of course, we gave it some treats and hugs along the way! During the winter of 2013 he would jump up on the outside living room window ledge, and look in at the cozy scene: empty-nesters and our brood of four felines But surely it belonged to to neighbors down the street! He looked so well-nourished!
After an absence of 2 weeks, he showed up one Saturday night, moving slowly and gingerly, and not wanting any food. Also looking scraggly and a little beat up. A visit to the ER patched him up, but also turned up a viral infection that took isolation, force feeding round the clock for several weeks, and several visits to the feline ophthalmologist. He was slowly accepted as part of the flock, and is now the only cat left in our house. Needless to say, spoiled rotten😏
eclare
@cintibud: What a sweet story. My condolences.
J R in WV
Currently out only cat is Punkin, so called because she is was tiny when she came to us, and ate so much she became shaped like a pumpkin. Wife heard her mewing trapped in a culvert under a multiflora rose bramble, and worked her out of there. She was the size of a chipmunk. a tiny thing.
When we took her to our vet asap, we were told she was 6 months old and needed to be spayed asap, so that’s what we did. Then we fed her, and fed her, and she ate and ate. Still a hungry girl. We fed her pumpkin on her kibble for quite a while when they told us how obese she was. Now we just give her frequent little bits of kibble, Usually around 6 am she creeps into bed and demands scritches. Which she gets — all she needs. She’s a mostly black tortie, and is surprisingly affectionate., even at the vets.
JoyceH
One day years ago, I was walking through my house and glanced out the sliding doors onto the deck and there were KITTENS out there! A mama cat had three kittens and just brought them over. (There was a semi-feral colony in the woods behind my house.) They lived out there for a few months; I didn’t bring them inside because I had two house cats and the kittens didn’t have shots or anything. I fed them and sat out on the deck getting them used to people and being picked up. My sister and I were going to take them all – I’d take two and she’d take one and Mama. But when the day came to take Mama to the vet to get fixed, she just vanished and was never seen again. I called them the Woodpile Kittens because I had a pile of cord wood back there and when they were startled they’d dart into the nooks and crannies of the wood pile. The last two of the kittens just died of old age a couple years ago.
beckya57
This is reminding me of a classic Twitter thread from a few months ago, about how dog rescues involve applications, interviews etc, and cat people find their cats “in the trash.”
Nothing so dramatic in our case. We have 3 cats, 2 from the Humane Society and one from a private cat adoption group. Scribbles is trying mightily to interfere as I type this (I was gone skiing all morning, you see.). They’re all adorable.
CaseyL
I think I’ve told this story before, about my current cat, Oscar, and his Mom, Jeannie, who died last year. But here it is in more detail.
In Spring 2008, a longish haired grey kitty appeared on my doorstep. A girl cat, skinny and hungry. I had an elderly housecat (Ariel, grey tabby) at the time, and was not contemplating acquiring more cats until she had passed. But no animal has ever come hungry to my house and been turned away, so I put food out for the little gray girl. She kept showing up every day.
The townhouse complex I live in is kitty paradise: our huge parking lot is between us and the main drag, so the traffic is kept to a distance. The place is landscaped with paths and open areas, bounded by trees. There is a greenbelt on the eastern edge of the property; beyond that, a cemetery. Many, many places for a cat to lurk, hunt and sleep.
On the other side of the open ground between me and the across-the-lawn units was a big old tree whose large root system was entwined with an overgrown juniper hedge. The reason I mention this is, the root system and hedge formed a cozy and defensible “cave,” formed by roots and brambles. I’m pretty sure Little Miss Gray called that her home.
So I kept feeding her, and I started to chat with my neighbors about her. Turns out we were all feeding her.
So maybe a month after she first turned up, the neighbors and I again check in with each other to note that, despite everyone feeding her, Miss Gray is not getting fat. Miss Gray is getting round. Rounder and rounder. We all start putting more food out for her, since she’s eating for >1.
She vanishes one day, and we all are worried. She turns back up a few days later, skinny once more.
We all had one question: Where are your babies??
Well, we had to wait until they were about a month old before she brought them out (probably from Root Cave): three Siamese-colored fluffballs, and one black non-fluff.
(There was also at the time a giant seal-point Himalaya cat hanging around. He was rough, tough and scruffy. He allegedly belonged to someone in the next complex over, though we were never sure. I am quite sure, however, that he was the daddy of this batch.)
So, we now had a whole family to take care of. More food for Miss Gray, now called MamaCat. Quiet debates among the humans on next steps. I’m the one who took her in to be fixed, as soon as the kids were weaned and eating solids. And that’s when she got her own name, at the vet: Jean Gray, forever called Jeannie thereafter.
The black kitten disappeared soon after that, probably gotten by a coyote or raccoon. (Jeannie’s hatred of raccoons was lifelong and fierce: With my own eyes, I saw her square up to a raccoon and swat it repeatedly across the face until it backed down. Even into old age, she would growl, hiss, spit and throw herself against the front door if a raccoon dared to appear on the porch.)
Two of the Siamese fluffballs got adopted out. Nobody wanted to make a move after that. There was the last kitten, that was easy. But everyone would take Jeannie “if no else one will.” I thought that was a horrible attitude to such a devoted, brave mama (who, BTW, was also affectionate as the day is long) so I took Jeannie and the last kitten…who I named Oscar, because even as a baby he was fearless and pugnacious.
Ariel overlapped them for about another year, before old age and failing kidneys meant I had to take her on that last ride to the vet.
Jeannie lived to age 15, when cancer got her. I still grieve for her. Oscar is still with me, and hopefully will be for many years. He’s not as affectionate as Jeannie, who would be in my lap the instant I sat down and who slept snuggled up to me: any lovies given are very much on his terms; but he is in his way very much a sweetie pie.
zeecube
My first feline was an eight week old stray chocolate point Siamese I found at my doorstep, meowing like crazy. Took him in and fed him some milk and tuna, and then he fell asleep on my lap. He had a big purr box, and when I’d scratch him under his chin, he’d smile a little and show his fangs. Later, I went next door to ask the neighbor if she was missing a kitten. She told me she found him after work in a downtown parking lot, and brought him home. She was not planning on keeping him and asked if I wanted him. His name was Toronaga Fang.
A Good Woman
So many origin stories in my life. Here is one:
My cat Rutger had passed and I thought I could live without a cat for a while. Turns out that was all of 2 months. I went to the shelter and toured the cages. In one was a black kitten all by himself, playing with a little ball attached to the cage with a string. When he saw me he stopped, stood up, gripped the horizontal bars and peered at me. I took him out for a visit and he started playing with my earrings while purring. LOUDLY! Game over! I named him HellBoy! and he was smart, affectionate, and totally tuned in to me. We had 13 good years. It hurt so much to lose him.
eclare
@A Good Woman: That is quite a name!
Manyakitty
How my cats and I ended up together, a history:
Schrodinger was the first cat I looked at. He was a mackerel tabby with a heart-shaped white patch at the base of his throat, sitting in a cage at PetSmart along with his brother and sister. He was calm enough when we took him out of the cage and I handed him to my friend who came with me to look at baby kitties. Then I saw a brief flash of Heisenberg’s gorgeous golden-green eyes and his silver tabby coat, pulled him out, and he ran up my arm, around my neck, and sat on my head. He had to come home, too. I still feel bad about leaving their sister behind, but I only wanted 2 and Heisenberg and Schrodinger were them. I got a terrible case of the flu within a few days of bringing home the kitty brothers and they stood watch over me the whole time, one one the bed with me, the other on the floor. Four months old and those guys knew.
A few months later, I was in another PetSmart buying food and litter and came across a scared, withdrawn little dilute tortie kitten, around 11 months old. When they handed her to me, she curled tightly around my arm and shoulder, started to drool, and purred so violently and loudly I thought the rafters would shake. Needless to say, she came home with me, too. If there is such a thing as a familiar creature, Manya would be mine.
Then we lost Schrodinger to lymphoma (FUCK CANCER) and after almost a year, Heisenberg still walked over to his brother’s favorite spots, stood there, and looked expectantly at me, demanding answers about his brother. 💔
Then one day, while at the vet for Manya’s annual checkup, I saw a tiny bebé whose eyes just opened the day before. Someone found him in their yard, waited and waited for mama to return, and when she didn’t, they brought the little foundling into the vet’s office for fostering. I brought Asimov home at just over 5 weeks old so the big kids could teach him how to be a cat. Manya literally cried when I brought him home (she made a weird noise and I saw tears 😥), but Heisenberg was SO excited to get a baby.
Fast forward to today, and Manya is still displeased with the interloper, but she tolerates him. Heisenberg and Asimov love each other.
Meanwhile, Asimov has filled Schrodinger’s role as my bed kitty and my boyfriend is happy because he was always wanted a snuggle buddy and now he has one. Each cat is special and unique and we love them all.
Thank you for this thread. I needed some happy, cleansing tears.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Boy do I ever have stories, but they will have to wait for another day as I’m up to my elbows in other stuff. I will soon be dragging one of those things here to get some opinions but right now I’m on a break from rebuilding our garden boxes. In February! Shit be blooming here in southern Oregon already.
Keep this as a feature and when I have the time I will tell some tales about some tails…
CaseyL
@Manyakitty:
So say we all.
(Lovely story bout your kitties.)
eclare
@Manyakitty: Awww…
Robert Sneddon
Not my cat acquisition story, but my Mad Friend Norman was out cycling one day when he saw a toolbox sitting in a swampy field some distance from the road. It wasn’t a toolbox, it turned out to be a pet carrier complete with installed cat. Someone had made great efforts to dump this cat, a small young longhair tuxedo tom.
Norman took the cat home. He already had a couple of dogs, the cat would stick around or leave, he didn’t care. He wasn’t keeping it but he wouldn’t make it go away either. He wouldn’t give it a name although he did at one time think about Microwave, as in Microwave the cat. Norman has a very strange sense of humour. The cat ate biscuit dog food and scraps but generally fed itself elsewhere. Its attempts to steal food from the kitchen table and our plates were usually dissuaded by a fork-stab but that didn’t stop The Claw from making its stealthy appearance every now and then regardless.
Norman soon began to suspect that the previous owners of the cat carrier had their reasons to dump this cat a long way from civilisation — think The Omen or The Thing if you want a cinematic reason. The Shining might also be appropriate.
The cat grew up but not by much, it maybe weighed three kilos as an adult and half of that was long hair. It spent most of its time outside slaughtering any wildlife it could get its claws on. Its signature trick was to climb a small tree and leap out at pigeons that flew by. We once observed it stalking a peacock on the nearby castle grounds but nothing came of that, we think. We did get a regular donation of three-legged mice presented to us, training aids which could only run around in circles. We think it was very disappointed in us. The farmhouse had rats, the key word “had”. I encountered the results of the cat’s depredations one night, staggering to the toilet in the dark. My foot got entangled in… “something”. When I checked via torchlight it turned out to be rat gut. Someone (no names, no pack drill) had nibbled the middle of a rat so the head and tail section were still connected by the stringy rat guts.
Smart little bugger — when it came home at night after a happy day outside committing genocide on the local biosphere it would loom out of the darkness at the kitchen window and bang on it with a gore-stained paw to attract our attention. This would be our cue to go and open the door to let it in.
Norman never did give the cat a name. Its grave is marked by a piece of whinstone grit with a question mark.
kalakal
The majority of my cat origin stories are of the backyard visitor becoming part of the family or of friend desperate to find a home for a cat. Of the 3 we have now the backyard visitor applies to 2, Virgil & Peaseblossom.
The 3rd, Cobweb, was a variation on the theme. The house we were living in had a large Florida room (screened lanai) and Mrs kalkalal had seen some bluejays going beserk mugging something in the back garden and thought she’d a small cat running from them into a tin hut at the back of the yard. The hut was dilapidated, full of junk & spiders ( hence Cobweb). I took a look, and there hidden in a load of old boxes and junk, was a tiny kitten. She was far too scared to come out and looked about 5 or 6 weeks old, far too young & small to be on her own. I took to sitting in there every day with her , taking her food & water, tin hut, florida in august, she really needed the water ( I wasn’ t working at the time) . Didn’t want to leave the food when I wasn’t there, she was snack sized for a lot of critters) . I was planning to get her trusting enough to bring her in gently and after about 3 weeks she would get within a few feet of me. Then a hawk decided the back yard was a great hunting ground & took 2 pigeons in 2 days. So… while Mrs kalakal stood ready at the lanai door, I sat in the hut and at the right moment made a grab. She went beserk, biting, ripping her claws into my arm. I didn’t dare let her go, ran for the lanai, Mrs kalakal shut the door and I released her .She was zooming up and down the screens for about 1/2 an hour. She’s my little cuddle bug these days but at the time I needed antibiotics.
Mogadon was a variant on the can you find a home? I was working in a hospital at the time which had a lot of feral cats. Every so often the pest controller would put out baited cages, any they caught they’d put down. One of the ward sisters sneaked in one day with a kitten she’d sprung from a cage and what were we going to do with it? And so I went home with a new cat
SteverinoCT
I was single, Navy, and stationed on shore duty in the Orlando area when I got two kittens by the clever scheme of looking in the classifieds. They cost $5, said the ad. I went for one, and there was only one left, and they could play with each other while I was away… I wasn’t charged– that was just to filter out the unserious. As they grew I made a cat flap for them, and was amazed at how they would leave with me in the morning, and come back in when I came home, what with the heat. Then I found they were actually beating feet around the corner to an apartment with 3-4 cats. Those Navy people transferred up to Groton, CT, and in due course I followed. There was an available apt across the hall from them: serendipity! Ground floor with a porch rather than balcony, and feral cats, racoons, and woodchucks were in abundance. Neighbor and I screened in our porches, and the cats adapted to an indoor-only life.
Neighbors would watch the cats (often bringing them over for visits) especially when I was underway, but one long weekend I returned from a home visit to find a kitten in the apt. He had been hanging out near the dumpster and the neighbors stashed him in my place “just until we find a good home.” Famous last words. The two female cats accepted this runty newcomer. He was laid-back; when he had peeing issues I brought him to the vet’s, and he sat calmly in the middle of the cat carrier, and in the waiting room sat on my knee among the dogs and cats. In the examining room I set him on the table and sat. The vet came in and saw me sitting there, no animal. A clink, he turns, and the kitten is on the second shelf checking out the bottles there. Just an quickly-caught UTI. When I married to a non-pet person (she tricked me!) the two older cats went to a shipmate who then transferred, never to be heard from again, and the kitten, still runty, was shopped around to my sister, then my new house-neighbor, and then across the street. He was indoor/outdoor by then, and still visited me until he passed away at a ripe old age.
Now all I have for an easy pet-fix is the three Great Danes newly moved in next door.
<edited for typos>
Manyakitty
@CaseyL: thanks. I’m giving all of them extra loves right now. 😻😻😻
Manyakitty
@eclare: Our pets make us whole.
eddie blake
watergirl, when you say the cat quivers, do you mean his tail moves like a rattlesnake’s? when hungry or excited? because that’s EXACTLY what our catie does. it’s nice to know there are others out there that do that.
i posted catie’s origin story here a while back. we adopted her from sean casey animal rescue, the same place we got her older brother. she was a plague cat, we brought her into the family a good three days before the city shut down from covid.
Manyakitty
@CaseyL: wishing you many more happy years with Oscar. Jeannie sounds wonderful, too. (FUCK CANCER)
Amir Khalid
There was an apartment building behind my home that a private college was renting to use as a student dormitory. I’d go by the place and sometimes I’d see the students petting this little black kitten. Sometimes the kitten would venture just outside the dorm’s front gate, so I’d get to pet her too and become acquainted.
Not long after, the college closed down the dorm. (It was a pretty rundown building, so I guess the dorm was a stopgap until they could find somewhere better to house the kids.) And not long after that, on Saturday the 3rd of Ramadhan, 2004, my mother passed away.
A week later, as I was going to get something for iftar, I saw the kitten again and stopped to say hello. When she saw me coming back from the Ramadhan bazaar, the little black kitten decided to take a chance on me and follow me back all the way home. And that’s how Bianca and I got together.
Manyakitty
@Amir Khalid: I went looking for the boys a few days after my grandmother died. Our loved ones sent us those cats to see us through.
eclare
@Amir Khalid: What a sweet story.
WaterGirl
@eddie blake: Not really. I never did notice what his tail did, I think it got some kind of a kink in it occasionally?
Mel
When I was a middle schooler, I was walking the woods on our farm in late fall, and heard a rustling in the underbrush. Out popped an emaciated, shivering little dove grey cat with white feet and a white blaze. She gave the most pitiful cry, and ran right up to me. I could see that her front paws were raw on the front and bottom, and I picked her up and put her inside my jacket and ran home.
Our farm vet made a trip to the house to check her out since she was so emaciated. She got some subQ fluids, he cleaned her poor little paws, and she settled in on my pillow next to my head, purring like crazy. The vet thought that she might have been trapped somewhere, since her paw injuries looked like abrasions from trying to claw her way out or in through an obstruction.
She was too weak and thin to schedule a spay just then, and he suggested that we bring her in to his office in about four weeks for a check up and to schedule her spay.
She recovered beautifully, and put on weight quickly – so quickly that we began to suspect that we might have a teencat mother on our hands. Sure enough – pregnant. She had her litter of little ones, we homed them, had her spayed, and she was my best buddy and constant companion for 17 years. She was with me through all the milestones of young life: losing my great grandmother, high school, first love, college, and my first day as a teacher. She was the best girl.
Shortly after I found her, we had posted flyers at the general store and the gas station and post office, since she was so sweet and people-focused that we worried she might be someone’s missing pet.
Nobody responded, so she got christened Zelda and settled in for good.
She loved to go for walks with me in the summer, and learned to walk on a leash. The second year she was with us, I was walking with her along the furthest line of our property. A small subdivision had been built a few years previously on what had been a neighboring farm.
A couple of kids, one around kindergarten age and one about 9 years old, came running up to the fence, yelling,”Friska! Friska!”
It turned out that their parents had gotten them a kitten, but didn’t spay her, and let her run loose during the day because they now “lived in the country”. When kitty came into heat and was spotted getting friendly with a stray Tom, the parents realized that she was likely pregnant, and dumped her in the woods, according to the kids. She found her way back, and spent days clawing at the doors trying to get in to her people, until the father started spraying her with a hose and throwing soda bottles at her until she finally stopped coming back. I was aghast. The kids were sobbing the whole time they were telling the story, and said that their parents hadn’t wanted to pay for a vet or to have to raise a litter of kittens. Their Friska was my Zelda. The kids had thought she was dead. Those poor kids. That poor kitty!
I told the kids that they could come and visit her if they wanted, and told them that I lived in the brick farmhouse down the road.
I went home and told my parents and my grandmother that I now knew where she had come from, and why nobody had come forward to claim her. They were all horrified, but my grandmother, an old guard Cat Lady, was utterly furious.
The next day, my grandmother and I were making lunch, and the doorbell rang. It was the kids’ mother, come to claim “her cat” , now that she was vetted and “spayed and not going to be a big problem again”.
My sweet little grandmother unloaded on that lady and sent her packing. Miss Zelda got to watch the whole event from her kitty bed in the living room. Sweet justice!
Miss Bianca
@beckya57: I read that thread, and that’s exactly what I was thinking about, too!
eclare
@Mel: I am so glad that story had a righteous ending.
kalakal
@Mel: Good for you and good for your grandmother! You turned a horrible situation into a lovely one. I’m sorry for those kids but loathe the parents.
Glad you Zelda had a great life together
Leslie
I have two kitty origin stories. One day, a friend of mine found a cat at a motel. He’d been left in one of the rooms, and the staff had put him outside. He was an adult cat, not a kitten, but he’d been there for days and whoever had left him there hadn’t come back for him. So she took him, but she already had two cats and knew they would not accept an addition.
So she called me, from the road, and I heard the kitty talking. And I knew, right at that moment, that he was mine. She brought him over, and that night he slept with me, and that was that. I named him Chaucer, and the two of us had many conversations over the years.
My other kitty came to me in the usual way, by the standards of this thread. One day I was on my way to work, and a tiny little kitten was toddling right down the middle of the street in front of my house. Just then, a pickup drove down the street, but fortunately the driver saw him and stopped. And the kitten ran right under the truck and wouldn’t come out.
Well, I obviously couldn’t leave him there. So I set my things on the hood of my car, went to the edge of the road, and did my best imitation of mama cat sounds. The kitten came running, talking at the top of his little lungs.
I took him inside, bathed him because he was filthy, and gave him some food. Despite his size, he had no problem chowing down. I thought about trying to find him a home, but we bonded in no time.
Both gone now, but both very sweet, affectionate cats. I miss them.
Manyakitty
@Mel: sorry for those little girls, but so happy Zelda got the life she deserved with you.
PBK
I have so many origin stories so I’ll talk about a friend who only has the one 😀
Thanksgiving week in a big apartment complex in a big city. Little gray cat playing in the landscaping by a side entrance. Kitty comes right over, meowing, pawing to be picked up. Put her back on her little patch of grass since we weren’t sure of her status. Next day we spot the kitty in the backyard. So did many other neighbors because a day later she was ensconced in the janitor’s office with donated blankets, toys, and food. Fliers posted and shelters contacted over the next week with no results. Building manager takes kitty to vet where it turns out she’s about a year old, spayed but not chipped. Building manager and myself convince friend to take kitty (not that much convincing was needed). That cat walked into the apartment like she had always been there…none of the usual curious sniffing and investigating. Made a beeline for the most comfy chair in the living room and jumped right up on it.
This past Thanksgiving was her 10th “gotcha day” ❤️
Glidwrith
One story: visiting the mother-in-law on her farm and what looks like a starved kitten runs up and starts rubbing on my shoe laces. This is in Kentucky and home is San Diego. Of course, we get a cat carrier and bold as brass fly her home with the cage on my lap. As long as I kept a hand on her she’s quiet and reassured. Walking through the airport, the meows are demanding that the hand of comfort be restored.
Two planes and roughly nine hours later, even the hand wasn’t enough. Increasingly urgent mews let us know the need for a litter box. Alas, two minutes from home and the battle was lost.
First time I had a female cat. A dark tortie we named Caramel and unbearably sweet. When we took her to the vet, we discover this four pound “kitten” is at least a year old and eating so much you could feel the kibble through her skin. The vet was so excited, she had three different kinds of worms, one of which the vet techs had never seen before and was it ok if he showed them?
Only one real problem in bringing her home: we had two mature toms, one at the sixteen pound mark. When presented with her, though, he stretches out a paw <bap! bap!> on the head….and apparently that was all he needed.
Caramel had one trait left from her rescue: truly enormous sneezing and trailing loogies that would tear plaster off the wall if we didn’t find it before it dried.
Jim Appleton
On a Saturday afternoon around the fall equinox in 1993, I was driving near Condon, Oregon looking for a plowed wheat field to borrow for a sculpture the following day, consisting of wooden stakes pounded into the ground every hour.
A few minutes before I found my spot, I saw a dead tuxedo kitten in the opposing lane. A dump truck I’d seen just prior suggested this had just happened.
Not finding what I was looking for here on Richmond Rd, I turned around.
When I got to the kitten, it was sitting up in the middle of the road, bent at an odd angle, shallow slow breathing, in a puddle of urine and diarrhea.
I stopped to move it to the roadside so it could die without the indignity and horror of getting squished. It was unaware of me until I picked it up scruffwise.
Sure that it had minutes to live, I put it in a small box, wished it peace, and drove off without much more thought.
That night I slept out, on a cot, in the field I’d found. I heard coyotes off and on, briefly thinking that’s likely where that dead kitten ended up.
Sunday morning I started my solar markings a bit after sunrise. Just after the 9am batch, I decided to go into town for food and a newspaper.
Passing Richmond Rd., I got curious.
The box was where I left it, now tipped on its side.
A foot or so away, there was that tuxedo kitten, clearly unaware that I was there. This time it was limp and unresponsive when I put it back in the box. I decided to take it into Condon to find a vet to put it to sleep.
The vet wasn’t home.
OK, I’ll keep the cat and bury it when it dies.
I put the box in the footwell of the front passenger seat and went on with my day, parked in the sunny field, reading the paper between flurries of activity. I didn’t think much about the cat, nor check on it, figuring nature would take its course soon enough.
A bit before 2pm, I was in the driver seat when the box wobbled.
Silently, eyes swollen shut, caked in dried goo, the kitten clawed its way onto the bench seat, very shakily took a few aimless steps.
I was motionless and puzzled, waiting for this spasm to sap the last life force from this doomed creature.
It took a step in my direction.
Then onto my thigh, still sightless and without a sound.
It clawed its way up my chest.
Now we were face to face.
Its right eye opened a crack, right paw extended and touched my cheek, and it started purring. Loudly.
Oh lord.
I put it back in the box and it promptly resumed the coma.
The kitten came back to consciousness a time or two more, but I was still sure it was a goner.
Driving back to Portland that night, it climbed into my lap and went to sleep, purring sometimes.
I dropped it off at the 24hr veterinary hospital.
They said he’d likely not make it. Internal injuries, and a likely skull fracture.
I left, sure I’d done the right thing, without any sense of attachment other than a feeling of intersection.
Wednesday morning, I phoned the hospital, curious to hear how the kitten checked out.
They referred me to the Pound.
“There’s nothing wrong with this fella. Come get him!”
At the time I was traveling for work more than I was home. A pet was out of the question.
I adopted the nameless male tuxedo intending to find him a home. Someone else’s home.
Everyone I asked insisted, “You HAVE to keep this cat!”
Reluctantly, I agreed, on condition that those who insisted become cat sitters.
For years, Kilo (he weighed 2.2 pounds when adopted) seemed initially disappointed when I came home because he preferred his cat sitters.
He was the most grateful soul, still touching my face with eye contact from time to time as he did that first Sunday.
Leslie
@Leslie: I didn’t realize I’d left out my second kitty’s name: Perkin (a character in the Canterbury Tales).
Mel
@Amir Khalid: She knew she was destined to be your kitty.
eclare
@Jim Appleton: Wow! What a survivor.
WaterGirl
@Amir Khalid: Bianca 💕
FelonyGovt
Aww, probably a dead thread by now, but here goes. My daughter was about 12 and in middle school and attending an evening astronomy class a “cool teacher” conducted from time to time. We got back home with her and a friendly orange tabby cat was in our driveway, coming right up to us. He hung around. My husband doesn’t like animals, but my daughter was at the very tail end of being little and cute, so her “can we keep him?” was met with grudging agreement.
I told her that if we adopted him, she would have to feed and take care of him. Yeah, right.
She named him Fuzzle and he became my special pal. When I was recovering from breast cancer surgery he sat on me, but not anywhere where he would hurt. What a good little nurse. He was outgoing and sweet. We had him until he passed away from lymphoma (sob) in 2010.
Don K
No dramatic story here. When my now-husband and I moved in together, his Siamese, Jackie, was part of the deal. I was fine with it; I had kitties as a kid, and didn’t get any as an adult only because of my sometimes weird working hours and my penchant for taking several vacations per year. Jackie was the sweetest, best-tempered cat you ever met. She put up with moving numerous times with Wade, and with living in a hotel with us while our house remodeling was finished. At the hotel, she would take walks with me through the halls and in the parking lot (it was a huge lot that fronted on a freeway service drive, so I always accompanied her. When we were outside and I said, “Okay, time to go in”, she would turn around and follow me inside. She travelled with us by plane back East several times, and put up with the underseat box but complained when the plane started moving. I had no idea a cat could meow for two hours straight. Her favorite place in the evening was curled up next to my leg on the couch as I watched TV; she accepted me as her second human quickly. Jackie left us as a result of intestinal cancer at an unknown age (Wade didn’t remember when she acquired him), and we soon had another kitty, but I’ll leave our further adventures with kitties (we’ve had six since Jackie) for another thread.
eclare
@FelonyGovt: It’s amazing how animals know when we don’t feel well.
Timill
We seem to be running a cat rescue here, so various cats are confined in different rooms until they’ve been vetted. Kiki, Mooshu and Oliver are in one room. As usual, all three bolted out when I went to feed them, but this time only two came back when the food was down. A quick look showed no sign of Mooshu, so I carried on feeding the rest of the Menagerie.
Mooshu turned up in my office, but now Kiki had gone missing. I found her in the bottom of a wardrobe, along with her new kittens. No count, no age, no nothing yet. Watch this space…
tokyokie
When I was growing up, we always had cats, never a dog, because my mother was a cat person. So when I thought I’d finished college finally, I started thinking about getting a cat. Not that I actually looked at the classifieds for one or anything. Anyway, I was working as a security guard, driving my beaten-up Pontiac Tempest around the facility and going into buildings to turn a key in a clock. But when I came out of one building, I heard this awful yowling coming from underneath my car. Omigod! I thought. I ran over a cat! I looked under the front of my car, didn’t see a cat. Looked under the back, didn’t see a cat. Went back around to the front, and this orange tuxedo kitten came sauntering out, yelling his head off but completely unhurt. So I picked up the little guy, who was 6-8 weeks old — he never told me his birthday — and he was purring like crazy. And I thought, OK now I have a cat. But I had to finish my shift before I dealt with a kitten, so I drove back to the security office, and not having a place to put him, placed him in a nearly empty filing cabinet drawer and shut it and finished my shift.
When I was done with my rounds, I returned to the office and opened the file cabinet, and he strolled out, still purring. And although I made a halfhearted effort to see whether anybody in the adjoining neighborhood had posted flyers about a missing kitten, I knew I had a new buddy, and I named him Cat 9 From Outer Space.
9 was a great cat. My roommate told me that when it was about time for me to get home from work every day, 9 would sit in the front window and watch for my car, then run to the entrance hall to greet me. For the last several years of his life, he would sleep curled around the top of my head. The yelling was a constant; he was a talkative little guy, who would scream like he was being disemboweled whenever he was disturbed. And he was the stubbornest animal I’ve ever known; once when I moved, he didn’t pee at all during the drive from St. Louis to Denver, while the other cats soiled themselves. I’ve had lots of cats since 9, but none of them has bonded to me like he did. He was a great kitty, until his kidneys gave out on him after he’d lived with me for 14 years and three long-distance moves.
PaulWartenberg
I’ve told this elsewhere, but here we go again Wiggles!
eclare
@PaulWartenberg: Cute!
Shana
@jackmac: What was the record store? Great story BTW and I used to live in that neighborhood.
jackmac
This may now be a dead thread, but I really loved to read everyone’s kitty origin stories (and added my own at No. 15). Thanks to all for sharing.
WaterGirl
@jackmac: Sunday threads usually go into Monday. :-)
Matt McIrvin
We’ve had many cats over the years but their stories are not that interesting–adopted them from shelters.
Once, we adopted one, a nice orange boy named Elmer, who turned out to have some sort of advanced kidney ailment and died just a month after we adopted him, so the shelter waived the adoption fee on the next one. That was Niobe, long gone now but still my favorite cat ever–a weird-looking little dilute tortie with tufts on her eyebrows and chin that made her look like an angry scottie dog. The shelter had just taken her in and was a bit uncertain about her personality, but she turned out to be both a hilarious pet with the usual tortitude, and a loyal friend.
(Our current ones are excellent though.)
jackmac
@Shana: Gramophone Records. It was actually still in business a couple of years ago, but at a different location nearby.
jackmac
@WaterGirl: That’s good to know. Thanks!
Odie Hugh Manatee
I read all of the stories and loved them all. I’ve had both dogs and cats but I’ve settled on cats because they are like me…
cool. ;)
Hoppie
Too many stories for one post, but Pickles was born under our house while we were traveling. Upon returning, we were mysteriously assaulted by fleas from the carpet. What? But the next day, when I started to mow the ignored yard, Mama cat removed, one by one, her kittens from our crawl space to the house across the street.
Later that winter, we returned from weekend trips to find a tortie on our porch three different times. The third time, we held the door open, and Pickles walked majestically in, tail held high.
She was one of the kittens born under our house that the cross-street idiots would feed but otherwise ignore, and was sensibly looking for a real home.
She found one.
FridayNext
A little late to this thread, but I have to share our story. When we lived in Florida there were sizable stray cat colonies as college towns do. We used to walk our dog, Ruby around the apartment complex and one day a cat started following us around on our walks. Then she started staring at us through our front window. Then she started sitting on the roof of our car. Then she came in to live with us. Since she looked like our dog Ruby, we named her Ruby Jr. Here is a video I made at the time:
Then my wife Shelly reported another cat was coming out to see her when she walked Ruby. This cat was super friendly and snuggly, but he never came out for me. So I named him Snuggleupagus. He eventually started following me home. He was just a kitten! He was too friendly and naïve to live on the streets so we took him in. Turned out he had a heart condition. Here is a video I made when he was still a tough-as-nails street cat
Mel
@FridayNext: Ruby and Ruby, Jr. – what a heartwarming video, and what sweet, lovely girls.