I've mentioned already that I do some volunteer time at a local shelter. It's a non-profit, privately funded place that's mostly no-kill. There are cats there who have been there since 1997. Their lives are better than they'd have been on the street, but older cats just don't get adopted like kittens.

Every Monday evening, I go and do "kennel duty." This consists of scooping litter boxes, filling food and water bowls, administering medications as required, and just generally paying attention to around thirty cats who don't really belong to anybody in particular. There are always a few who really stand out. Al the volunteers and employees have their personal favorites.

Back in April or early May, this big, red tabby guy showed up in the isolation area. He'd been fostered, and the foster had treated him for ear mites, but the medication had irritated his middle ears. He was back at the shelter to have extra medication applied to his ears, and to have antibiotics for a stubborn URI that hadn't ever quite cleared up. I could see why they brought him in for the meds when I tried to give them to him the first time -- Flame (the name the foster or the shelter employees had given him when he came in) was hell on wheels when it came to anybody touching his head. He'd twirl around like a gymnast on the parallel bars until you either let him go or clamped him firmly between your knees and waited until he settled down. Having experienced this behavior before (with Punk, our rescue from last fall), I clamped and waited. He calmed down and got his meds. As soon as I was done, he crawled up on my lap and stuck his nose under my elbow.

Once the meds were over with, he was fine (a local veterinarian does 'vet check' every Tuesday night), so he was settled into a cage in the adoption display room. Everybody at the shelter made fun of me because he obviously preferred me -- and Tony -- so much that he'd whine and cry any time either of us spoke in the room. Monday nights became a major battle, because I wanted to have him out of the cage in my lap all night, not go around and scoop poop. But scoop poop I did, and I only got him out to wallow at the end of the evening.

I guess it's apparent where this is going. It would have gone there almost three weeks faster, if it hadn't been for a bout of calicivirus (an upper-respiratory virus that's 'cat flu' for adult, healthy cats, but fairly deadly for older cats and small kittens) which caused the shelter to quarantine all the cats and put a hold on adoptions. My biggest fear was that they'd lift the quarantine and somebody else would adopt him before we could get there to do it. Fortunately, nobody did. We brought him home the second week of July.

Much to my surprise, considering how much hollering the girls did while he was in the 'isolation room' here, once we let him out, after about a week, things were really cool. Tink, who owned the house exclusively for almost two years before we brought Punk home, didn't kick up much fuss at all. Oh, sure -- she hissed and howled at him a few times. Punk was the one I was worried about, though -- she would hiss and stalk the screen we'd put over the door, the whole time he was shut in the room. Within a few days of letting him out, she was playing coy, teasing and chasing him through the house.

We've renamed Flame 'Gord' after a character on the Canadian television show "The Red Green Show." Ranger Gord, on the show, is a guy who was a park ranger at one time, but who hasn't had a paycheck in about ten years. Everybody's forgotten about him, and he's a little crazy. He hates to see anybody leave. Gord the cat used to bite my elbow gently every time I finished doing my kenneling tasks and closed the cage. He also looks like Wayne Gretzky -- he's blonde, has a long nose and is kind of athletic without being burly -- and Gord is such a Canadian name, we thought it fit him nicely. Not that, as a cat, he feels it's in his contract to answer to any given name.

Three cats is a nice number. Our neighborhood isn't 'cat friendly,' so I wouldn't dream of ever letting any of them out into it -- we're in southern Ohio and there's a family of at least nine coyotes living here, among other things -- but the house is just big enough to accommodate the three of them in comfort. We have three litter boxes and two sets of food bowls, which Tink and Gord seem to have a sort of truce over sharing.

I'd never have believed Tink would do so well with company, if you'd told me two years ago. We've theorized lately, if we'd known it would bring her back out of her shell so thoroughly, bringing another cat in, we'd have got a second cat a lot sooner. As grumpy as she can be, she's in better shape and seems to be more affectionate now that she's sharing the house with two other cats. And they're all reasonably well behaved (or we're pretty slack about what we regard as cat discipline).

Anyhow, that's the Nowikowski household so far. No, no more cats. Not yet, anyhow. Not in this house.

That's what I said last April, when Gord showed up.

Copyright © Melinda Nowikowski
September 3, 2000