Gratuitous Cat Post

We have three cats. If you don't care about cats, then there's nothing to see here. Move along, move along...

The cat thing started like this: We moved into the parsonage and that day, an emaciated pathetic yellow cat sat at our back door and meowed at us. I looked at Beth and said, "That cat is not coming inside, no matter how pathetic it looks." I'm allergic to cats. But that night, Beth couldn't find me--because I was outside petting the cat. That was on Wednesday. By Friday I told Beth I was taking the cat to the vet to get all the requisite shots to bring him inside. It took a year before my immune system adapted (my lower eyelids would get puss-filled; gross, I know). Turns out, he was the last pastor's cat who ran away when they started moving. Since being taken in, he has gone to great lengths to make sure he'll never be hungry again and has grown to be about 17 pounds (he was over 18 before we put him on a diet last year). That was Wesley. He's more my cat than Beth's. He purrs loud and hard and is just a sweet cat all around.

A few months later, our Lay Leader came to a church baseball game with a new kitten that she got from a litter her sister cat had--and there were still more kittens to give away. So we took one to be Wesley's friend. That didn't work out so well. We had to take Luther with us to Springfield when we went to homecoming because we were afraid Wesley might eat him. He used to be very brave and bold, but after a traumatizing incident with the mattress delivery men, he's the biggest scaredy cat (he was hiding under the bed and then they took the bed). He spends a lot of time under the bed, but will come out if you make him a cave out of pillows. Luther's a jumper. I've gone out to the kitchen in the morning and have found things left on top of the refrigerator knocked to the floor. He is thoroughly Beth's cat--not to say he doesn't like me, cause he does. But he LOVES Beth. He's very playful; he plays both peek-a-boo, plays chase, and does somersaults while chirping all the way.

I found Merdock last September in the parking lot of the church after a church council meeting. We were in the fellowship hall and I had seen him walk back and forth a few times in front of the glass doors. After everyone had left, while I was locking up, I saw him huddled in the middle of the lot. I walked up to him, scruffed him and picked him up saying, "What's your deal, little guy?" When I turned him around, I saw that one of his eyes was building out of his head and the other was collapsed in. My heart broke. I took him to the house and put him in a cardboard box full of litter. He staggered around and was suffering from diarrhea. Beth and I decided to take him to the vet to have him euthanized. Since it was his last night on earth, I gave him a can of the good cat food. The next morning we found that he had eaten nearly 1/2 pound of cat food (he wasn't any more than 3.5 lbs). He was a different cat; his waste was solid and he was coordinated and lively. We took him to the vet to find out about his eyes and to get him healthy. Turned out he had bacterial feline chlamydia that can be passed on from the mother at birth. The plan was to get him healthy and find him a home or take him to a no-kill shelter. Beth said that two cats was plenty, but I wanted to keep him. Since I was in school, Beth ended up having to take care of him, giving him his medicine and feeding him and making sure he was sequestered away from the other cats until he was curred of all communicable diseases. Then one night, after Beth had given Merdock his eye medicine, he crawled up in her lap and went to sleep. Neither Wesley nor Luther were lap cats at the time; this broke Beth's heart and I got to keep the cat. He maneuvers about the house as if he could see (When excited, he sometimes runs into walls). Because he climbs and can't jump to get up on things, he's built like a bulldog with huge shoulders and tiny back legs.

Turns out, Merdock was six months old when we took him in. he was just so malnourished that he was so small. When we took him in, he had a cat face, not a kitten face, and a full set of adult teeth. In the next three months he put on 9 lb. Merdock is the alpha cat. This doesn't make sense until you realize that cats establish dominance through staring. Merdock orients his head toward whatever he's attending too so he can hear and feel (with his whiskers) what's ahead of him. The other cats try to stare him down, but you can't stare down a blind cat. Plus, because his front legs are so powerful, when he wrestles with the other cats, they can't get loose--he latches on and bites their faces. He's our most playful as he has to be physical to really interact with us. He'll wrestle and fight my hand, and loves crawling up on us to nuzzle our faces.

The first two are obviously named after John Wesley and Martin Luther (we feed three outside cats, too, named Fletcher [after Methodist theologian John William Fletcher] Suzie [after John Wesley's mom, Susanna] and Sam [after John Wesley's dad]). Merdock was blind and had a tendency to jump [blindly] from heights (from your arms, the top of the washing machine, etc.). There's a Marvel superhero named The Daredevil: The man without fear. The character happens to be blind, and is name is Matt Merdock. So we named our last cat after the Daredevil, as he is the cat without fear.

That's the story of our cats. Hope I didn't bore you too greatly.