No kidding, I have a cat named George. And I'm going to tell his story backwards, I guess. He will be 18 in a couple of months, which means that he is the one family member who met my Mom when she was still...herself. He has survived three of my most recent lives, two of his own major illnesses, and being stuck with sharing the name of the stupidest U.S. president in history. (I tried later to change it to Jordi, after the guy in Star Trek, Next Generation, but I couldn't make it stick, not even in my own mind.)
He's quite ill now. He has had inflammatory bowel disease for a few years and we have treated it successfully, but now he has pancreatitis, hurts, can't eat and feels pretty ugly. We put in an esophageal feeding tube yesterday and took x-rays to check the placement, finding that he also has a completely disintegrated disk in his low back--taking after his other mother, Carolyn--which explains some of his strange gait. And he only weighs 6 and 1/2 pounds. And I love him, calling this little old man "my boy, my sweet boy", remembering him as the tiny, tiny kitten he was when he entered my life, not ready to eat from a bowl so we had to run out and get a bottle and some formula for him.
I always worry that I am holding on to them too tightly, not being willing to give them the freedom to leave this life when they need to leave, but both Carolyn and Leni--his doctor--assure me that he is so not ready. George, himself, tells me, too, when I stop being all emotional about it. He purrs whenever I come into the room, checks out anything that looks like potential food and wants to go out whenever the damn snow stops, so I realize that it's all about my fear, not his.
So, I have to go to the beginning of the story. This was a couple of relationships ago and we had bought a house in Danby. We had three cats, one hers and two mine, and now had room for an "ours". Off to the SPCA! I had always wanted a gray cat, so that was the mission. Now this wasn't the new, shiny, no-kill shelter we now have. This was the old, bunch of cages in one room, "we'll kill ya if you're here too long" shelter of the past. Eek. Sad. Really sad. No gray cats. Few kittens, and the ones that were there seemed a little too quiet for healthy kittens. And all of those incarcerated older cats reaching through the bars of the cages at you. I left crying and had nightmares for the next few nights.
And then I went back, on a whim, by myself. Two litters of kittens had come in. One litter was a robust clump of long-haired soccer players scampering around in their cage playing with a ball. And in the cage below was a litter of tiny kittens all meowing at the top of their lungs and looking at the ceiling of the cage, obviously concerned that the elephants upstairs were going to come crashing down on them. I reached in and snagged the only one that was not currently yelling. There were five black kittens who were all male and three tigers, all female. I wondered if it was like "Lady and the Tramp". Remember when Lady had puppies and all the girls looked exactly like her, little Cockers, and all the boys looked like their questionably pedigreed Dad? Any way, I called my partner at work and said, "I found a kitten for us. He's not exactly gray....he's sort of very dark gray." Her response was along the lines of "If I say no does that mean you'll be crying and having nightmares again? Well okay then". And we had our new "ours".
They bathed him, blow dried him, treated him for ear mites--all of which he protested, loudly, and he was mine.
When we got home, my partner declared that she got to name him and we were going to have one cat whose name needed no explanation--I tend to give my animals rather fanciful names with tons of meaning, some would say, baggage. His name was George. Well, okay then.
George did a lot of clinging to us and crying. Everything scared him. After a couple of days, we got the bottle and started feeding him KMR and it was much better. I woke one morning to find him standing on me, playing with his first toy, fiercely battling a tiny scrap of back material that had fallen on the floor of our sewing room. It was about two inches long and maybe three quarters of an inch thick. It was the same color as he was and he knew he could conquer it. From then on he was a new man. He didn't win the other cats over for about a week. My big boy, Path, didn't speak to me for about three days and was shockingly frightened of this little mite. And Kindra, Path's mother, thought she was done bringing up babies, thank you, and mostly ignored him. Then one day, Kindra was sleeping on the couch and George got up there and curled into a little ball about two inches away. She looked at him. She put her head back down. He moved a little closer. She looked at him. Put her head back down. He moved so that he was touching her. She looked at him, looked at me, sighed a huge sigh and reached over to wash his head. "Well, all right, if I have to..." He snuggled just a little closer and they both fell asleep. As soon as she accepted him, Path gave him grudging acceptance as well. My partner's cat never did like him, but she lived her life praying for the abduction of my cats by someone who lived very, very far away, so it was okay.
So there you have the beginning of his tale. Keep my sweet boy in your prayers or good thoughts or whatever, that the end of his story isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future, and I'll be back with his exciting, swashbuckling story soon.
<3
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