"Old Fella" era of late 70's was our messiest eater. My best friend now at Rainbow Bridge, gifted me with him as her boyfriend found him mooching the lunches of a bunch of tough but tenderhearted toward felines construction workers at a worksite where he was pouring concrete. When he left the construction site, Old Fella (my name for this cat) was beside him in the big cab of his concrete mixer truck.

I had to laugh when my girlfriend brought him - Old Fella, not her boyfriend - to my place. He was a battered old fight veteran, torn ears, bad 'tude from being on his own for a long time, and to top it all off, NO TEETH, only a few, way in the back of his mouth. The only thing we deduced was a possible run-in with a vehicle which might have knocked them out. We couldn't do any better than that, both lacking much imagination. Anyway, I soon found out something odd. The other cats, by the way, gave him a wide berth but no fighting occurred as they were a laid-back group of transplanted Californians. Old Fella, having no teeth *did* shove his food around, big time, with his nose, making a huge mess in the kitchen so I soon began feeding him away from the bowls on a spread-out daily newspaper. A great solution, he shoved food around and eventually captured it to eat with his tongue.

Old Fella never became a loving companion and spent a great deal of his time for some reason we never discovered in the bathtub, where we only removed him to bathe ourselves. At that time we lived in an apt. right next to The 'Niner as I-95, the east coast Biggie, is called in Miami, and Old Fella frequently would get on my bed, not to be friendly and cuddle his loving hoomin, but to sit on my wide windowsill watching the heavy traffic going by below. He was the strangest cat we ever had and lived to a ripe old age; my sons were the type to put up with anything, and just left him alone generally. It was much more fun to leave the top up on our hall clothes hamper and watch the real Hopitus fall into it when he made a jump for his favorite perch on top of it.

Old Fella was not a pretty cat; about half-feral in personality, but such as he was, we loved him. And after all these years, we still have a soft spot for those construction workers who kept him fed all that time, till he got hijacked and came to us.

In Loving Memory of Old Fella

Copyright © Hopitus, 2008