Cat Tales – Page 25

Warning: Today I Will Talk About My Cat

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Dec 022005

Rummaging through my hard drive yesterday (I never did find the file I was looking for), I discovered an old usenet thread I had saved where the group regulars were all talking about their cats. Since I know everyone loves hearing about how great my cat is, here’s what I had posted, back in mid-2000:

Never ask a cat owner to talk about their cats–it’s like asking a grandparent if they have any pictures of the grandkids. :)

Phurball is a generic domestic shorthair, with dark gray tabby markings. I am biased but I think he is a very handsome fellow. We used to live in a neighborhood that had another gray tabby–my husband couldn’t tell them apart, but it was quite clear to me which was which. The OTHER cat was not nearly so handsome; he was lanky and had an angular face. Phurball is sleek and well-proportioned and has a lovely round face. His eyes are green and he looks like he’s wearing eyeliner.

Phurball came to live with me before I was even married. A friend of mine was standing out in his front yard when a car drove by, and the occupants flung a cat out of the window. (For a long time I tried to tell myself the cat had jumped out, not wanting to believe anyone would be so deliberately cruel, but when I mentioned this theory to my friend he disilluded me.) He retrieved the cat, who remarkably was unhurt, but my friend already had two dogs and four or five cats and his wife put her foot down at any more. He knew I was cat-less at the time and asked if I wanted the cat. Well, to me a house (or at the time an apartment) isn’t home without a cat, so I adopted Phurball.

Who turned out to be a wonderful cat. Whoever chucked him out that car window really missed out. He is friendly and affectionate; he loves nothing better than to be petted and loved. He will ignore food in favor of affection. He’s surprisingly chatty for a non-Siamese cat; perhaps because I talk to him all the time and it’s just natural to talk back, or perhaps it’s just his nature. He quickly forgave me the unpleasant trip to the vet for his “operation,” and amiably agreed to go along with the few rules that I set for household pets (mostly no walking on cooking or eating surfaces).

If I’m eating something Phurball thinks he would like, he won’t beg or pester, but will sit politely by my chair and wait patiently. If I am reading or talking and don’t seem to be noticing him, he will reach through the rails of the chair’s back and give me a gentle poke to get my attention. Sometimes he will do that even if he doesn’t want any food, but would just like a caress and some conversation.

He is the most forbearing animal it has ever been my privilege to live with. As our family increased to one and then two children, Phurball never made the slightest move to scratch or bite the kids, even when they were infants and still learning to be gentle with him. If little hands got too rough he would merely remove himself from reach. I think he also trusted me to prevent the small ones from getting out of hand, as I trusted him to excercise patience with them.

He also enjoys playing mind games with the adults. Sometimes he will wait until he has our attention, then abruptly stare with great fixation at thin air. After we spend several minutes looking to see what he’s staring at, we will glance back at him to find him smirking at us. Occasionally he will sit in one place and meow until I come to see what’s wrong, and then just beam at me as if pleased I responded. His favorite perch is an old couch which is set on end; its upper end is about seven feet high and he likes to sleep in this elevated perch. Once when we had some friends over we were all standing next to this perch talking. Phurball bounded up a foot or two to cling to the side of the couch, looked over at us to make sure he had our attention, then strolled leisurely up the vertical surface to his perch and sat there looking insufferably pleased with himself as our friends expressed their awe.

And in one last anecdote…I once bought him a catnip mouse and put it into my purse to give him when I got home. By the time I got home I’d forgotten about it. Later that night I saw Phurball up on the kitchen table (you may recall that he doesn’t GO on the table, he knows it’s against house rules) sniffing with great interest at my purse. It wasn’t until he actually took the zipper tab in his teeth and started working the purse open that I remembered that catnip mouse inside. I have never seen a cat that could unzip a purse until then. Perhaps I’ve just never seen a cat who WANTED to unzip a purse.

Summer Camps = Loads of Fun

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Jun 222005

Every summer, for the last five or six years, my son has attended a city-run camp for high-functioning autistic children. This year he moved up into the “teen” category, but although the kids are separated by age they’re in the same park, and see the same camp counsellors year after year.

My son is definitely “high-functioning;” many people don’t realize he’s autistic unless I tell them. Sometimes they might simply think he’s a little odd. The most noticable traits he has is that he has trouble picking up on the subtler social cues, and he tends to rock and flap his hands when he’s tired or excited. There are others, but nothing you’d really notice on casual acquaintance. We haven’t had him formally diagnosed since the initial assessment that determined his autism, but we’re fairly sure that he falls within the Asperger’s spectrum.

He is a very intelligent young man. I have often thought his intelligence is the reason he has been so successful in learning how to interact with other people. He studies facial expression, gesture, tone of voice, trying to determine the unspoken messages they convey, and then he will ask for clarification: “Are you sad?” His memory is phenomenal, and I suspect photographic—his favorite thing is to do a walk-through of someone’s house, and then draw the layout of the rooms. The drawing is always accurate, both in the layout of the rooms and the proportions of their size and location. He draws from top to bottom as if tracing a picture, because that’s exactly what he’s doing—he’s tracing the picture in his head. Only in the last few years has he come to understand how remarkable his memory is.

For much of his elementary school career he was in classrooms that were separate from the average school curriculum, along with other special-needs children. In the last few years, though, he has reached the point where he could be mainstreamed into the general classes. This has been a difficult adjustment for him. In the isolated special-needs environment, he was a star pupil, usually the most verbal and self-sufficient child in the room. In the non-specialized classroom he has to struggle to keep up. There are distractions and background noise that make it difficult for him to focus. The material being covered is more difficult. The teachers are less willing to let him go off and do his own thing when he gets tired of paying attention. And, of course, he gets teased by some of the other kids, because he is different.

I think it’s been good for him, nonetheless. His social skills have improved a lot. He is now doing work that is only slightly below the grade level of other kids his age, where in special-needs classes he was often following a curriculum several years behind. His teachers have gone out of their way to find strategies to accomodate his particular needs and help him learn the material. He has made friends with some of his classmates. At the end of the school year the students are given end-of-grade tests to determine how well they learned the curriculum for their grade level; my son scored three out of a possible four. Next year he starts high school, and while it’s going to be hard work for him, I think he can succeed.

But if it’s good for him to be mainstreamed, to be held up to the expectations that apply to the majority of his peers, it’s also good for him to sometimes have a chance to just have fun. This is where the summer camps come in. He could probably get along fine in any summer camp, but going to one for autistic youth means that he’s surrounded by people who don’t care if he flaps, or if he makes funny noises, or if he wants to go sit alone in a corner for a little while and regroup. He can relax and be himself, and that’s the whole point of summer vacation.

In other news, the porch railing is now painted.

My younger son helped for a while (the older, as mentioned above, is in camp today). When I first opened the can of combination paint/primer, I saw the paint was a drab brown, almost gray—nothing like the rich brown depicted on the label. I remarked on this to my son, adding, “Well, we’ve got some darker brown left over downstairs, we’ll just use this as primer and then use that as the second coat.”

As it started to dry it turned into the darker brown you see here. I said, “Oh, it’s changing color as it dries, we won’t need the other paint after all.”

My son replied, “Yes, it says it does that on the can.”

This is why I take him with me when I go shopping. He notices everything. He’s the one who found the paint that was also primer, so we didn’t have to buy both.

Oh yes, and this is the other contributor to our paint job.

Her name is Casey. Technically she lives across the street. You couldn’t tell if you didn’t live in the neighborhood, because she spends as much time at the adjacent houses as she does her own. When she saw us painting she came across the street for some petting. You may notice some dark brown streaks on her tail; we tried to keep her away from the wet paint but were not entirely successful. Our railing has some decorative tufts of orange fur, too.

Yard Sale!

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May 062005

My poor cat.

Our neighborhood is having a yard sale tomorrow. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been dragging old crap out of the basement, cleaning whatever’s particularly dirty, testing electronic bits to see if they still work, sorting and affixing price stickers, and heaping it up in the living room.

It is, from his perspective, a great upheaval. Like most cats, he does not like sweeping changes to his routine or his environment. In the past, when things got moved around to this degree, it heralded a move to an entirely new house. So he’s understandably a bit concerned about it. He follows me into the basement and inspects the newly empty spaces, then follows me back upstairs to examine the relocated stuff. He meows anxiously at me, and I try to reassure him that we’re not moving again. The he goes to hide on our bed, as far away from the activity as he can possibly get in the house.

Me, I’m tickled to death about it. One of my industrious neighbors organized the event; all I have to do is shove things out. I shovelled out the toys that haven’t been played with in eight years, dragged out some furniture and appliances (if we were going to use that chair that’s been down there since we bought the house, I reasoned, we wouldn’t have bought a new one last year), and now I’m eyeballing the old stack of VHS tapes—we don’t even have a VHS player any more.

It’s been raining all morning; I have informed God that it must not rain tomorrow. I’ve explained the situation; I really, really want to get all this crap out of my house. Whatever’s left after the yard sale is over is not coming back in, it’s going straight into the van and getting carted to the veteran-run thrift store across town.

And in the meantime, I’ve been giving Phurball gooshy food for dinner every night to make up for the anxiety.

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