The Cats: part two

Going back to the whole "window on our world" thing. Please indulge me by reading about Agnes. I promise. You will not be disappointed. The cat, she is hilarious.

I got Agnes from a shelter in Athens in the fall of 2004. She had been born in a litter of 3 to a family pet and the owners couldn't keep the kittens, but also didn't want to have a surrender on their records, so they decided to try to starve the kittens to death and dispose of them that way. Luckily, someone reported them. But not soon enough. One of the kittens was dead and two were so severely malnourished that they needed serious care. One of them didn't survive. The other one, well, she is my Agnes.

The shelter in Athens is in a small, low-lying building with one main room that has kennels all around the walls. It is important for you to imagine this scene. I walked into the room and was immediately greeted with howling. Whoever really believes that cats don't love people, has clearly never been to a shelter before. Cats love people. They want to be part of a family. They just don't display their affection quite as vociferously as dogs do.

I looked around trying to make a decision. The workers always have their favorites and try to push them on you. I looked at some of the howlers, then the grabbers (you know the ones, they stretch their little paws through the cage to try to grab hold of you), then I saw Agnes Grey. (Her name has not always been Agnes Grey--you can't fault shelter workers, they see so many animals that naming them all must be really daunting.) She was tiny. And terribly skinny, you could see the whole length of her spine, her hip bones, shoulders and every single tiny rib. She was curled up in a ball with her back to me. I thought, that's my cat.

(A short digression: there is this wonderful scene in Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov where Ivan Bezdomny has been apprehended by the police for claiming to have met the Devil in Moscow. He's being examined by a psychiatrist and he realizes that he has three choices. He can attack the psychiatrist and attempt escape, he can admit that he's crazy and stay in the institution for the rest of his life, or he can "seek refuge in proud silence." He chooses the third.)

Part of what I loved about Agnes at that moment was that she too sought refuge in proud silence. I opened her cage and gently lifted her out. I took her into the play room and sat down on the floor and set her down next to me. She stood there. She looked at me. She gingerly crawled into my lap and laid down. I began to pet her from head to tail and she just laid there looking sad and tired. We sat like that for a few minutes. Both of us feeling lost in this big place, both of us feeling disconnected from everyone we thought we knew. And I picked her back up and signed the papers.

The shelter told me what had happened to her, and that I could not take her home until she gained some weight. So I left her there. A week later I was back and I I took her home. She wasn't eating for them and I knew. I knew that if I could get her home I could get her to eat. So home we went. That night she ate an entire can of food and howled until I let her into bed with me. She slept on my face. And from then on she began to eat me out of house and home.

Agnes is still tiny. Well, compared to Leike she's tiny. She's slight and dusty grey and hilariously clumsy. She runs circles around Leike and chases her like a dog. Agnes is our cat who can't seem to get loved enough. She is funny and sweet and adores our little family.

She's also maddening.

I had had her for about a year or so when she ate 5 yards of blue embroidery floss in one bite. As in she never chewed through it. And I refuse to violate this blog by telling you how we had to get that out of her. It wasn't pretty. And it didn't smell so good either.

We used to live in a complex in Athens that had "dumpster" cats. People would adopt cats and then couldn't get rid of them so they just left them in the complex, the cats go feral and live out of the dumpster. Being the bleeding-heart that I am, I bought extra food and left out for the dumpster cats. Once Agnes figured out that they were on the outside and she was on the inside, she would taunt them through he sliding glass doors.

Agnes is at her happiest when she is on top of one of us. And she is. A lot. It's sweet and adorable and funny and incredibly annoying when your asleep and you can't move because there's a cat wedge up against your behind. Or worse, when you realize you can't breathe because she's fallen asleep on your face. Agnes is the Husband's favorite. She is very easy to love.