September/October 2004

Cat Toy

Mabel was a pal, but Boots rules

by Larry Maddry

I received an e-mail photograph recently which was designed to whet my interest in football now that the gridiron season is upon us.

It was a photo of a cat wearing a football helmet, carved from a giant lime or avocado. It was very funny but probably faked.

If you own a feline, or know something about them, you have to believe a cat wouldn’t wear a helmet of any kind for a nanosecond. . . and forget about one posing for a photo.

I was a dog owner for most of my life. Cats seemed suitable for little old ladies who polished silver spoons and drank tea. Definitely not a man’s companion, I figured. So, after my dog Mabel died, I didn’t want another pet, feeling it would be unfair to her memory.

Yet my condominium was a lonelier place.

Four months later Boots appeared. During a rainstorm,someone left a kitten in box beside some heat pumps, about 50 yards from my door.

The neighbor who found it asked if I knew who owned it. “It looks abandoned,” she said.

I moved the box to a reasonably dry location, near some steps leading to the second and third levels of our building. I put a tin of milk inside and walked away. I hoped that someone passing the steps would be the tiny bundle’s owner and take it home.

After dark, while it was still raining, I walked outside to see if the kitten was still there. It was. A small, soaked, black and white ball of fur with large eyes. Meow.

I named him Boots. He’s been my companion ever since.

Boots, I grant you, is not a very imaginative name. But it seemed about right. He now has long white legs leading to his black body. And someone booted him out of where he once lived.

I had a lot of boning up to do on cats now that I owned one. I read articles and a book about felines. The most helpful fact I learned is that cats have not been domestic animals for very long, compared to dogs, cows or horses. So there is a lot of wildness in them.

Rudyard Kipling wrote that the cat walks alone and every place is the same to him. True enough. And T.S. Eliot said a cat is something that is always on the wrong side of a door. Absolutely.

Boots’s wildness is undeniable. He will suddenly, for no apparent reason, streak through the house at 90 miles an hour—a blur of motion—before hiding in the closet.

Wild, perhaps, but insatiably curious. When I am in the room where I type on my computer, Boots will fly in from another room if the inkjet printer is turned on. The printer makes a lot of beeping and buzzing sounds before printing.

Once the beeps and buzzes begin, he dashes to the paper tray and rises on his back legs, inching his face as close to the slot issuing the paper as he can, an extended paw relentlessly probing the narrow black orifice.

Boots’ favorite television broadcast is the one from CNN. He cares nothing for the news, of course, but is fascinated by the stream of news which crawls across the bottom of the screen. Boots thinks the news crawler is a long, persistent bug. He rises on his back feet to reach the screen and swats at the bug for many minutes with his right paw.

Nowhere in my reading did I learn that cats are alarm clocks. Boots is remarkable in his willingness to assume that role when he chooses.

The procedure he follows is progressive, depending on how long I lie sleeping after the sun is up. A Boots toy hangs from the knob on my bedroom door: a long string of beads with feathers and a tiny bell at the bottom.

He begins by swatting at the tiny bell with its soft tinkle. If that doesn’t work he proceeds to plan B. Beside my bed is a large lamp with a metal pull chain and a metal ball at the end. Boots swats at the metal ball so it strikes the metal lamp frame making a loud clang. He does this three or four times, as necessary.

That usually works for him. I get up. If not, and I still lie on my back, eyes shut, he proceeds to plan C. Plan C is a guaranteed get-up. Boots begins in the far corner of the bedroom, jumps onto the bed, landing in the middle of my stomach before sailing off the bed to the floor.

I’m still learning about Boots. If he wants to play and has been ignored, he pounces onto one of my feet and wraps himself around it, like a boa constrictor, refusing to loosen his grip as I walk across the living room.

There are lots of things to know about cats. And I don’t know half.

But this much I do know. Mabel and I were pals and shared the condominium. But with Boots it’s different. He owns the place but lets me hang around.