We have a neighborhood cat that my ten year old named Little Gray.
She was buddies with our cat Milo who we adopted last Christmas. Milo lived in a house that was physically falling apart and the household seemed to be very troubled as well, after while the city condemned the house and the people who lived there were all kicked out. Milo got left behind in the process. My wife started feeding him over at his house and he followed her home and so she started feeding him at ours, and he hung out around our house a lot. It got intensely cold just before Christmas so my wife decided he was going to live with us.We already had three cats before Milo. We got them 12 years ago. My at the time only daughter was about to turn two and we had told her she could get a cat for her birthday meaning and then our dog got hit by a car so that really cemented it. (This is a fun story! Poverty, homelessness, pet death! I’m fun at parties. I’m not actually. No truly I am. But don’t invite me to a party, I don’t want to come. I mean, I do, but I won’t. Still. Were I to come, I’d be fun.) My wife found a web site for a cat rescue place that listed basically little personal ads for cats and there was a kitten who sounded just right for our family in personality. It turned out that kitten was paired with a littermate who was friendly as well so we figured we’d get both of them.
My mother in law had gotten a cat who was a huge pain in the neck until she got a second cat and then he calmed down massively - he’d been making trouble because he was bored, I think; he craved a creative outlet and sense of direction so he started a blog and got grumpy on social media, it was a whole bad scene. Our assumption based on that experience was that a pair might be less trouble than a singleton.
I called the rescue place - it was a cat foster person - and said ‘I’m calling about the two cats’ ‘three cats’ ‘three cats?’ ‘yes, three, not two’ ‘the web site said two?’ ‘oh you probably looked at it when the littlest was sick, we don’t list them when they’re sick but she’s better now, the three of them are litter mates, she’s the runt and a little sickly, if you just want the other two we can do that’ and I was like, oh yes we’ll leave the sickly runt and take her family away because we are cartoon villains, we’re also going to eat the other two cats of course, being villains, as you must have guessed when you offered to let us villains villainously abscond with this poor kittens sole remaining family. That’s what I meant, what I said was ‘can I talk to my wife and call you back?’
We talked and at first my wife was like ‘well what if we just go meet all three and decide then if we want the third cat’ and I said something like ‘totally, we’re definitely going to meet a third kitten and think to ourselves, fuck this shitty little cat, we hate this kitten, we want just the other two cats, that’s definitely the most likely outcome here’ and she was like ‘yeah I guess if we agree to meet the cat we just are going to bring it home.’ ‘Exactly.’ So we got all three cats. Turns out the sickly runt is the most sociable of the bunch, big personality. Now the three are getting to be cats that are old people, being 12ish, and that’s an adjustment.
It was also an adjustment adding Milo to the house. He’s somewhere between 4 and 8, the vet said, more like 5 and 9 now I guess, since we’re coming up on a year of him living in our house. The other three have slowly adjusted, integrating him partly into their social network, there’s still conflict sometimes. By the way, recently, like maybe a week ago, Milo came over and lay down next to me, kinda snuggling a little and he stayed there. He did that twice in a day or three span, for the first time since he moved in. He's skittish and startles in a way that makes us think he's had some bad experiences, particularly with men or a man, and he's been extra shy with me compared to the rest of the family, so that felt like a real step for him and made me happy. I like animals massively (always have, had dogs as a kid - and, like, I dunno, I was especially close to my dogs? when we lived in the country I'd take long walks, spend a lot of the day outside just me and my dogs - and my grandparents had cats, dogs, barn cats, and horses, and later my mom had some sheep, and my grandparents and I would sometimes hang out with a neighbor who was a farmer, used to love seeing their ducks and geese and chickens and goat and donkey and cows) and it feels nice to have an animal like me.
So anyway when Milo was between houses he got to be buddies with Little Gray, we’d see them palling around, and sometimes Milo talks through a screened window to Little Gray. We later found out Little Gray is the indoor/outdoor cat of someone who lives on the next block over and is named Bo. Bo creeps through the alleys and yards and eats food at our house - my wife still sometimes feeds some of the outdoor cats - and Bo is a he not a she, not that it matters especially. So now we call him Little Bo Gray.
Yesterday I walked out the front door to go to work and Little Bo Gray was across the street in my neighbor’s yard - the yard’s on a hill and has some plants, some flowers and whatnot I mean - and he was walking uphill away from the street and toward home, just starting to get under the plants - he seems to like hanging out under bushy plants, he’s skittish about people - and the storm door slammed behind me and he spun around and started walking toward our house. He knows the sound of our door and likes it when we come outside, he runs over to say hi when that happens. I say we but I really mean the rest of my family, as was confirmed when he saw me and just me on the porch, stopped, cocked his head, and turned back around to walk away. So I started the work day feline rejected.
That’s a pun. You should groan meow.
That’s a pun too. Sorry. I just cat stop myself and I’m not even kitten.
