The Meme

Today’s prompt is from inventrix: the cats

Oh, twist my arm!

Kitties kitties kitties!

T & I have three cats right now – Oligarchy, Theocracy, and Meritocracy. We got Oli & Theo about a month after Drake died, in June of 2012.

Drake was our Sugar Cat, my diabetic flesh-eating fluffy happy monster for whom I wrote Tales for the Sugar Cat (a fund-raiser). He was with us for about twelve years – not nearly long enough – and died two years after his foster-brother, the first cat Sam & I had together, Gatsby. They are both still keenly missed.

But I made it about a month before I started looking for a new cat. I wanted siblings, I wanted boys. Siblings because Gatters and Drake, not related, had never gotten along great, boys because the girl cats we’d encountered – roommates’ girlfriends’ cats – had been miserable.

The Humane Society had no sibling pairs and wanted $150/kitten.

The next shelter over had a lovely pair of marmalade brothers with extra toes, but they adopted them out while we were filling out the paperwork.

We ended up finding our boys on Criagslist, just 4 blocks away. Little poofballs – we’d been looking for shorthaired marmalade kitties; these were longhaired grey-and-white. But they were friendly, they liked being handled. And I didn’t want to live any longer without cats in the house. Home they came!! We tossed around a bunch of names for them; for a week they were Thing One and Thing Two, or Lefty and Righty (Each has one white sleeve).

They were born in March; they came home in June. A year later, T. found three kittens in our hedgerow.

A while later, the three – who wandered and came back, wandered and came back – were down to one, who liked to stand in the hedgerow and yell at T. We started feeding her kibble, and T would move a little closer every day. Eventually, she would tolerate being petted.

We named her Sullivan, because my dad had a yard cat named Gilbert who was all white, and she was all black. But as I found myself cooking meat scraps before we put them in the compost bin (which she was eating out of), we realized we were keeping her. She needed a name in trend.

Sullivan became Meritocracy o’Sullivan. And as she started getting friendlier – as it started getting colder – we very politely shoved her in a cat carrier and left her at the vets for three days before bringing her inside.

And that’s the story of my kitties.

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