She Who Hesitates...

Hesitation...Every time I visit the Pet Finders, the website featuring all sorts of pets for adoption, I search what appear to me to be an overwhelming number of cats in my area, most as close as one mile away. There are photos galore, and it becomes an exercise in overstimulation. I leave feeling a bit frustrated and sometimes verging on tears.

The only conclusions I've drawn are that, apart from being a big softie and wanting to home several which would be not only a lot of work but unrealistic at this point, I've never adopted this way, and I still miss my boy. Someone suggested a hamster, gerbil, bunny or other small pet. Though sensible, I just don't warm to them as well and really know nothing about them.

The very first pet I remember as a small child was my mother's cat, an adopted tuxedo we named Sam. Unlike Jacob, Sam was a largely outdoor cat who loved to wander. Apparently, at one point making his way into the area of the commissary from which bedding and furniture were sold, he inflicted such heavy damage on the underside of a mattress that my mother was forced to pay for it.

I was four when Sam came to stay, and I still harbor vague memories of the evening my mother put me in the back of her car and drove to what I would learn was the pound. I have no recall of any discussion about getting or caring for a pet.

Instructed to stay in the car and keep the doors locked, my mother cracked my window ever so slightly before beating a hasty retreat into an unfamiliar building. She emerged with a loudly meowing feline whose cries only increased in volume as we made our way home.

Sam, as we were quickly to discover, was neither a lap cat nor very affectionate, unless he was hungry. After eating his weight in Puss'n Boots, he would station himself at the front door, and failing to achieve escape, would then roam the apartment. When this proved unsatisfactory, he could often be heard scaling the the shelves in the bathroom, our kitchen or my bedroom. This was because, though a nascent master of stealth, he determined that his angst would only attain the desired result if he succeeded in knocking things around. The faster and louder he did so, the sooner an angry human would put him out.

That he lived in a humid, tropical paradise teeming with an endless array of avian, reptilian and other life forms phased him not in the slightest. I recall the day he cornered a rat as big as he was. It was later found on our doorstep, a gift of the hunt to his frequently annoyed human. Sadly for Sam, he departed the planet within four years, a middle-aged cat who might have lived longer had my mother fully understood the dangerous allure of the world beyond our door.

Until Next Time...