One of the tell-tale signs that you are speaking to a Crazy Cat Lady is when you ask her how many cats she has and instead of answering “one” or “two”, she hesitates. She gazes past you for a moment, eyes squinted, lips pursed...and it dawns on you: she is actually counting them. In her head.
On the rare occasion that someone asks me how many cats I have, I usually pause, uncertain how to respond. It’s not that I don’t know how many cats I own, it’s just that I’m not sure how many of the cats I care for count as ‘mine’. For the record, I own two cats. But then there’s Ollie…
I don’t count Ollie as my cat, although I feed him, and make sure he gets to the vet when needed, and he sleeps in my bed. You could say he’s a family cat. But perhaps he’s best described as being a true ‘community cat’. As I like to say, “He comes with the neighborhood.”
One beautiful sunny summer day almost six years ago, I was with my brother at the neighbor’s house. The neighbors were away, and we were pet-sitting their five cats. We were just hanging out with the tv on, when suddenly my brother excitedly called my attention to the picture window in the living room. I looked up from a magazine and was shocked to see a little orange face peeking in at us. It was a cat! It was a slender orange tiger, to be more specific, with a gigantic head and bright, inquisitive eyes. My shock turned to amusement as the cat paced up and down the front porch, now standing up on its hind legs to look through the window, now meowing pathetically in at us. My amusement turned to concern, however, when the resident cats took offense to the newcomer’s nosiness. As I observed him pawing at the window, I was certain that if I opened the front door, this cat would waltz right in and make himself at home. We ultimately decided to ignore him, and I guess he went away.
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| A Peeping Tom! (Heh heh.) We snapped this photo the first day Oliver showed up in town. |
He didn't go far, however. It was some weeks later that I found out my younger brothers had started feeding the orange cat, even establishing a routine with him. I was not living at home that summer, but I received reports of how friendly and loving the cat was. They hadn't let him in the house, though, because at the time we had two elderly cats who I thought would have been very unhappy to have company.
When I finally came home, I immediately shared in my brothers’ compassion for the little creature. (He actually wasn’t that little; he was a mature adult cat, maybe a year or two old.) It seemed he could never get enough attention or food. He loved to be petted, and he was at first so thin you could feel every rib when you stroked his side. Yet his head was huge, and that was very funny to us. (I later learned that it’s quite normal for tom cats to have big heads.) My brothers had won his complete loyalty.
I felt that we should officially decide on a name for the cat, and after a little back-and-forth, we came up with “Oliver”. We called him Ollie (when we weren’t calling him Big Head). As every cat lover knows, naming a cat is the first step toward owning that cat. Sure enough, I next decided to allow Oliver to spend the chillier nights in our back room, which was a separate room that in normal houses would be the garage. He seemed okay with the arrangement, though he didn’t like to be inside for very long, and he was insatiably curious about the rest of the house.
One day, it happened: as I opened the interior door to go into the house, Ollie darted past me. He raced through the connecting laundry room and into the family room, where he hurried to investigate all the new and exciting sights and smells. I trailed along in his wake, resigned to the inevitable. He checked out a bedroom and the bathroom, then headed up the stairs. It wasn’t until he came face to face with one of the resident cats that I decided they weren’t ready for a meet-and-greet, so back outside Ollie went.
As it is with cats, once Ollie figured out how to get IN, it was difficult to keep him OUT. The question we were faced with was: Were we able and ready to have three cats? The hard sell was my father - not a lover of cats - but as winter approached, even he softened until finally, with a great sigh, he said, "Guess we'll have to come up with the money to get that cat fixed."
Ollie had already visited the veterinarian to be sure he was safe to interact with our other cats. He did need to be fixed (that’s just the responsible thing to do, after all), but the price for the surgery quoted by my vet was a little out of our price range. Happily, my mom quickly found a low-cost spay/neuter clinic through a local rescue group.
Interestingly, Oliver fit in rather well in our home. He only tried to mess with the older cats a few times, and he was soundly scolded until he learned to leave them alone. He ate a lot. Eventually, his body caught up to his head and things became proportional. Then it started going the other way and now he’s fat!
As I think about Ollie’s arrival in our neighborhood, I feel that he may have been a ‘drop-off’ -- a cat someone decided they didn’t want or couldn’t keep, so they dropped him off in the woods near our house. That would explain how he showed up out of the blue, his instinct to be inside with people, and his overall friendliness. But it’s also very possible he was simply a stray.
Ollie was the first ‘stray’ I intentionally took in, even though we already had two cats and I knew it would be tough to adopt him into the family, let alone get permission to do so. I have always had a very soft heart for the lost and lonely cats of the world, but Ollie was the first my father grudgingly allowed me to ‘save’. (Thanks, Dad!) I wonder how he would have felt about taking Ollie in if he knew he was opening the floodgates to a whole world of cat rescue.
I don’t think Dad regrets it. From time to time you might even find Ollie curled up in bed right there at Dad’s feet.
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| Ollie as he is today. Photo taken Tuesday, February 24, 2015. |
