It Begins WIth A Cat.

As things often do in this life. Not just any cat, though; Uhura the Cat, a sleek, coal black female with bright green eyes.  I don't have a picture of her. (This is a stock photo.  It's pretty close though.) I wish I did; actually I have lots but they are all actual photos on paper, and if I have to try to get that scanner to come online even one more time I will probably pitch it out the window and leave it for the Jawas But anyway, she was a beautiful and very smart cat.  She lived with Joan, who had had her since she was a tiny kitten, and then, roughly about 1996, I came along.

Here's the thing.  I had just broken up with somebody, and in the breakup, the somebody stole my cat.  I was so thoroughly undone by the breakup and everything else that I not only swore off dating for life, I swore off cats. I would never have another cat. Forget it. I did not need that level of heartbreak and aggravation.

Then Joan moved in next door, and, well, we know how that ends.  And Joan came with Uhura the Cat.  And if Uhura the Cat hadn't liked me, well then, Joan wouldn't have had anything to do with me.  But Uhura did like me, and darn it, I liked her too.  It was hard not to like her. This was a cat where, if you picked her up and she decided she wanted down, she beeped you on the nose with her paw. I'm not kidding.  Sometimes she beeped you emphatically, as if to say, I want down now.  Other times she'd hover around your face with her paw.  Maybe I want down and maybe I don't.  Hm, I have to think about it.  Again, a very smart cat. With a sense of humor, no less.

Shortly after we bought our first house, the condo in San Diego, Uhura got sick with fibrosarcoma, a common cancer.  She had surgery and some chemotherapy (it doesn't make cats sick the way it does people).  It didn't cure her, since fibrosarcoma generally can't be cured, but it did buy her about six more months, during which she didn't know she was sick. Two days after she had the tumor removed, she tried to tear through the screen door to get at the orange cat that liked to lounge on our patio. Not until she quit eating and started coughing a lot in the last few days of her life did it become obvious she was really going to leave us. We had her put to sleep in December of 2000.

It wasn't the next day, but it was probably not very many days after that we woke up one morning and the house was too quiet.  Any house without a cat is too quiet.  We went out that afternoon and adopted Caesar and Chloe, a brother and sister pair, from a cat rescue service.  They were inseparable at first; then, once they realized they lived in a safe house with nice people, they decided they really didn't like each other all that much and spent much of their time at other ends of the house from each other.  Well, that was okay.  They were great cats.  They survived a flooring installation, an attic remodel, a move to Texas and (in Caesar's case) cancer at the age of five. And if you've ever been over here you probably met at least one of them, or maybe both of them.

One of our neighbors gave us a kitten (gee, thanks), with an eye problem. Eventually the eye had to be removed.  This was Sparrow the Cat, named after the infamous one-eyed "CaptainJack" Sparrow. Only, as it turned out in the second movie, he actually had two eyes; the eye patch was a prop.  So we'd named our cat after a bird for nothing.  Well, that was okay. Sparrow didn't know she was named after a bird.  She did fine without the eye, the only problem being that she'd sometimes jump for the feather toy and miss.  (Depth perception and all that.)

Caesar, our cancer survivor, came down with another case of it, as sometimes happens, and died at the mighty age of sixteen.  Not long after that, Joan found a kitten outside under a truck during a rainstorm.  She took the kitten to the vet, and the vet told her he could put her in with a litter of feral cats in the back but was Joan sure she didn't want to keep her? She was very sweet.  And so we met Artemis.  Boy, was Chloe less than happy.  She was sixteen herself by then, and not impressed with the pipsqueak.  But Sparrow liked her, and put up with having her tail pounced on and her ears chewed on and, once in a while, being the victim of a flying leap from the other side of the room.

Sparrow developed a neurological problem and lost the use of her  back legs.  Being unable to walk is a deal breaker for a cat, so we had her put to sleep at the age of twelve. Then it was just Chloe and Artemis, at least until last week when Chloe slipped out of the world at the super-advanced age of eighteen.  And a few mornings later, Joan and I woke up (with Artemis; Artemis is fine) and realized it was still way too quiet in the house.

Meet Grayson, our new handsome boy.

It all comes back to Uhura the Cat. Without Uhura, there wouldn't have been Chloe and Caesar, and without them, we wouldn't have met any of the other fine felines we've been so lucky to have. I don't know if I'll make it to the age of eighteen in cat years (around ninety-five, we think), but even if I do, I will still have a cat.  Can't live without a cat. Can't write without a cat, for one thing; if you don't have a cat, you don't have anybody to curl up on a fresh pile of pages from the printer, so how do you know if they are any good?