My cat Jazz (known also as Jazzle cat or You Old Baggage) turned 17 yesterday.
Looking at her last night - thin and very moth-eaten - I remembered how she used to be: sleek and stand-offish. A sort of Angelina Jolie of the cat world.
Her kidneys are failing and she’s being kept alive with special cat food and her own indomitable cussedness. And lots of bowls of milk (I know, I know - but you haven’t heard the demanding meow she can make when she thinks she needs her white stuff).
And so I started remembering all our other cats. Sam was the first, acquired when I first started working - he was part Siamese, part Persian and part unknown (a breeder’s cat had an unexpected encounter). He was very, very big and very black and he was my cat-of-a-lifetime, my soulmate. He was a tearaway kitten who turned into a patriarch with great gravitas, who later in life took on two kittens and taught one of them to be a cat. He died at 16, in my arms. Those kidneys again.
Those two kittens - Jodie and Lee-cat - came to use when we moved in together, along with my 13-year-old stepson. Jodie was camel-and-white, self-possessed, clever and affectionate. She was taken by a car after having one litter of kittens (I wanted to see what that was like) - one of them Jazzle.
Lee-cat, a timid ginger boy was a welfare kitten who didn’t know how to walk on sand (but Sam taught thim, along with other things - like how to clean yourself). Big on purr, rotund of body, small of brain, he was the sweetest cat I’ve ever known. We had him euthanased at 16 last year - again, the kidneys.
Somewhere in the ensuing years, before the birth of my son, came Wallace. A Burmese who survived one horrific car encounter (minus his tail though) only to be taken by another a year later, he was That Cat. He peed in the sink when he was cross with me, he slept in our bed under the duvet with his head on the pillow like a human being, and he wandered the neighbourhood to such an extent that he had a collar and disc with my phone number on it. Oh - and he went in the stormwater drains and caught rats. His record? Six in one day.
When he died, a neighbour who had been on Wallace’s rounds, said: “That cat was a legend, bru.”
And then there was, and is, Tigger. She was hand-reared from an abandoned four-day-old litter by our neighbours but decided she was going to live with us. And when Tigger sets her one-track little heart on something, there is no point in humans thinking otherwise. So ours she is, calico fur, damp sneezes and all.
These cats were all part of our lives when we lived in a garden flat in the Cape Town city bowl. When we did the move to the swimming-pool suburbs with the Kid, we also got a dog - a mad Lab-cross called Indiana, who turned out to be a chaser of cats. Tigger and Jazzle have carved out a tolerable existence on the kitchen table, though.
And so I look at our Old Baggage and remember all the cats who have graced my life - legends all of them. And look forward to more, in the fullness of time.
* Use our comment form to tell us about pets you have known and loved...