George Clooney, lime green, a purse, and a cat

Have you ever wanted to crawl into a purse and hide?

There have been a few times in my life where I would have liked to do just that. Like the time George Clooney teased me about my funky, lime green, suede shoes. They really were funky. Maybe just a little too funky. But what does George know about style?

For the record, I didn't crawl anywhere and I didn't hide anywhere. No, instead I laughed along and when George apologized later, saying he hoped he hadn't offended me I assured him he had not and laughed it off.

I never wore those shoes to work again.

So I took Cooper to the vet for a check-up last week. He was not happy about this expedition. He suffered through the indignations of being weighed and having his temperature taken by the vet tech and then he was done. He was desperate to get back into his carrier. But it had been a little tricky getting him out and I had wisely locked the carrier door.

We had to wait a few minutes for the vet. Cooper quickly realized no matter how many times he circled the carrier and pulled on the door, it was staying shut. So he looked for something else to crawl into. Something safe. Something stylishly funky.

My favorite purse with the lime green interior was sitting on the chair. Somewhat awkwardly, Cooper maneuvered himself into the purse,  He tangled his legs in the handles in the process, but eventually he got his whole cat-self inside.

Then he hid his head.

This post is participating in Wordless Wednesday at 5 Minutes for Mom

I was wrong

I'm participating in Mama Kat's writing prompt: A time you were wrong.

The stench was putrid in the room full of fourteen rescue kittens looking for homes. Kitten poop and pee. Too many cats together in too little space with no windows. It was hard to be in there for more than five minutes. But we stayed. A whole thirty minutes. I wanted a snuggly, confident, loud little Meeser. Like the two Siamese cats I'd had for years.

I chose one who snuggled against me and purred.

Katie wanted a crazed but beautiful little girl. Tim and I said no. We didn't want a crazed kitten.

Caroline took to a shy, lanky, blue-eyed baby with stripes on his face, legs and tail. And ears that were too big for his head. He didn't want to be held. He shook in fear the whole time he sat on her lap. He didn't utter a sound the entire time we were there.

I didn't want him.

"Let her have him," Tim said. "She empathizes with his shyness."

We took him.

We named him Cooper.

(We also took the one I wanted. We lost him a few months later.)

To our surprise Cooper didn't hide or shake when we brought him home.

But he nipped and he swatted. Not a lot. But enough that it was annoying.

He didn't melt into me when I picked him up. Instead, he held both his paws out in front of him, as though in defense.

For a while I wondered if he was missing his vocal chords. That was weird. A cat without a voice. When he finally talked it was a high-pitched, small sound. Not really a meow. More of a squeak.

I felt guilty about not liking him more. I even wrote a post about him: The Coopie-McCoops Problem. He's not a super cat, I said. He's the girls' cat, not mine.

We almost lost him to a long piece of a toy horse harness. A lot of fluids, barium and a night at the vet's helped him pass it. Almost losing him made me appreciate him a little more.

Showing his shaved leg from the IV 

He started sleeping with me. He's snuggly with me at night. I like the feeling of him there. When it's cold he curls up close to my head. When it's hot he stretches out like a cat sausage, all his legs up in the air. He's a sound sleeper. So sound that I've accidentally pushed him off the bed. Twice.

So a year has passed and his creamy body has given way to stripes. He's grown into his ears and paws. He rarely nips. He rarely swats. He's with me all the time. He lets the new kitten snuggle with him. He doesn't scratch the furniture. He doesn't chew on anything. He doesn't jump on the counters or the table or steal food.

This morning Caroline was home sick. Cooper climbed onto her lap and snuggled down for a long snooze. The first time he's ever done that.

I was wrong about Cooper.

The way he looks at me out of those blue eyes. The way he's with me all the time. The way he sleeps with me. The way he's chosen Caroline as his special family member. The way he tolerates Katie when she carries him, his legs dangling. The way he put up with Katie forcing him into a paper cat house she made. The way he's sensitive. The way it's taken him all this time to grow his confidence. All of it.

He's ours to stay. My guilt is gone.

I want Cooper now and if I had to do it over I'd pick him again.

Have you ever been unsure of an animal you've adopted?

Our new kitten

Our new kitten arrived on Saturday. The girls named him Emory in honor of our first Emory who died last year when he was just 8 months old.

The new Emory is very busy! He's in the refrigerator whenever there's an opportunity. He's particularly interested in the vegetable drawer.

He loves it when Caroline carries him around in this basket.

He collapses at 8 o'clock every night.

This post is participating in Wordless Wednesday at 5 Minutes for Mom.

Going on a lizard hunt

There's a tasty lizard with a long tail behind this TV cabinet. If I weren't so big I could get it!

Maybe if I try around the other side. Darn! It's just out of reach.

45 minutes later: Maybe I can lie here and just keep on an eye on it.

Okay. I give up. I'm going to nap.

This post is participating in Wordless Wednesday.

The Coopie McCoops Problem

Coopie McCoops. Pooper McPoops. Nippy McNips. Stinky McStinks.

Cooper is a rescue cat from the Bakersfield shelter via a Siamese rescue group. He's a Lynx Point which is a fancy way of saying he's got some Tabby and some Siamese in him - a tabby face, a raccoon tail, subtle stripes on his creamy body and blue eyes.

"He's absolutely adorable," Katherine says. Yes, he is adorable looking, except I suspect Katherine means everything about him is adorable; the nipping and swatting aren't so adorable to me. Neither is his habit of passing stinky gas, something that's usually followed by a loud cry of "EWW! Cooper just had a big Stinker!" from Katherine.

Caroline picked him out of a group of fourteen kittens and Cooper somehow senses this because she is his favorite; she is the only one he licks.

He's a pretty good cat. But here's the problem with Cooper: he's not a super cat. This wouldn't be a problem except he came on the heels of a super cat: Jasper (see post about him) and he lives with a super cat: Charles.

Is this fair to Cooper? No. I like him. I could probably say I like him a lot. But he's not making it into the pantheon of awesome cat characters anytime soon.

But don't tell the girls. They adore him. And maybe that's what's most important.  He's their cat, not mine and if I can remember that maybe I'll give him an extra pat later today and hope I don't get swatted in the process.

Remembering Jasper

The first time I saw him he was sitting on the sun splashed dining room windowsill at my sister's house in Canada. She had kept him and his brother for a month until they were old enough to get the vaccines needed to enter the US. She and her family called him "The Brave One." His little three-pound kitten self was unimaginably cute. He seemed unimpressed with me, even when I told him I was there to take him home to California. He opened his mouth in a yawn and stretched out.

Twelve hours later I lay in my little one bedroom apartment in Hollywood listening to him running about, crunching loudly on food and periodically scratching, scratching, scratching in the litter box. I didn't sleep that first night. Somewhere I had read that when you first got a cat you should confine them to one room. My mistake was confining he and his brother to my bedroom.

I named him Jasper. I don't know why. It was a name that came to me and it seemed to fit. I kicked him, along with his brother Charles, out of my bedroom at night so I could sleep. He and Charles found a comfy spot to sleep at the back of a closet in the living room. Every morning they came scratching on the door at 7:30 and got into bed with me. After a month I let them sleep with me. They slept snuggled against me, Jasper usually on top of the covers, on my leg, all night long. The boys, as I came to call them, always greeted me at the door when I came home from work. Jasper insisted on being picked up and snuggling against my shoulder. If I was carrying groceries and went into the kitchen first, he would climb onto me, shouting at me.

Jasper grew bigger and bigger and by the time he was two he weighed fourteen pounds. I had moved into a two bedroom apartment with a friend and he started sleeping under the covers with me, often on top of me, his buck tooth digging into me. Every evening when he heard my car pulling into the back he would race down the hall to the back door where he greeted me, shouting and demanding to be picked up. He followed me from room to room much like a dog. He came when he was called. He stopped tearing around the apartment when I asked him to. He was amazingly cooperative. He loved meeting new people. Once I gave a cocktail party for my college's LA alumni branch. The Canadian Consular General attended with his wife. Jasper spent the whole party in between them, being petted and fawned over.

By the time he was five he weighed 16 pounds, a weight he remained at for most of his life. He was a large cat. The vet suggested he should lose weight. I moved into a one bedroom apartment by myself and Jasper was furious at the move. He didn't greet me at the door for two weeks. But he came to accept that apartment. He often sat outside on the porch I screened in for him, but his favorite spot was a little sleeper that attached to the windowsill at the front of the apartment where he had a perfect view off all the goings-ons of the eclectic residents. Every evening he cuddled up on me while I read my scripts and manuscripts for work. He attended every dinner party I gave, always amusing the guests by jumping into recently abandoned chairs and sitting upright, as though he had every right to be there. Which he did.

He was athletic; he could jump great big leaps. He caught a bird who flew into my apartment and ate the whole thing save for a few feathers. His brother helped, of course. But I know it was Jasper who really caught the bird. Once I took him to Toronto with me for the holidays and my parents had recently acquired a new Airedale puppy. Unlike his brother who was determined to get into a knock down drag-out fight with that dog, Jasper wanted nothing to do with him. In order to get away from one of his brother's run-ins with the puppy he took a flying leap that must have carried him five feet into the air and at least seven feet across. My father, a witness, said it was a "heroic leap."

He happily moved into a little house when I married Tim and then made the trek north with us when we moved to San Francisco. In San Francisco he found his happiest spot, the top deck of a cat throne in a sunny, warm, south-facing bay window on the second floor. In San Fransisco he posed for his portrait, spending a whole day sitting on the couch in the living room while the artist tried to paint him. He accepted both my girls, letting them pat him and not running away when they shrieked at him. He was an amazingly tolerant fellow.

In San Francisco he became an adventurous cat. One night Tim came home and while he was bringing a large load of dry cleaning in, the boys slipped out the door. I heard Charles crying loudly and finally found him outside the front door but no Jasper. It was a typically windy, cool San Francisco night. I called Jasper a few times and he came galloping down the sidewalk, back up the steps and into the house, meowing loudly as if to say, "what? I was out for a stroll."

 We had a sunny deck and garden in that San Francisco house and I bought leashes for the boys and we started bringing them outside with us. Jasper loved this privilege. It was the first time in his eight years that he had ever spent time outside. He seemed happy to stay on the deck. We started letting him out without a leash. Then we became a little too comfortable with the whole thing and would go inside to get something, leaving the boys outside. A few times Jasper wandered off the deck into the garden. He always came back when he was called. Once, we forgot he was outside. Caroline was not yet two and I was upstairs with her when I heard terrible cat fighting noises. I knew at once it was Jasper. I raced down the stairs with Caroline following me and out the door. No Jasper. Not on the deck, not in the garden. Someone from the house behind ours said he saw two cats fighting in the next garden over and one looked like a Siamese. I called him and called him. So did Caroline. He didn't come. And then I saw him, tentatively poking his head out from under our next door neighbor's back porch. He wanted to come but was too terrified. Tim climbed over the fence and handed him to me. The leash went back on.

He moved back to Los Angeles with us and eventually found a comfortable spot on the top deck of the cat throne in front of a breezy window. He learned to stay out of the girls' way. He spent four nights in the ICU at the vet with pancreatitis. He lost a little weight. He started slowing down. He stopped greeting me at the door. But he still managed to catch a lizard who had made its way into our house. He and his brother ate everything save the tail.

He slowly developed an understanding with the girls. They pet him on our bed. He hissed at Katie once when she was three. She bit his ear. I told her he was within his rights and she said she knew that. She liked to talk about that, how Jasper had hissed at her only once when she "bited his ear." He knew just how to handle a child who pushed her boundaries. He visited each of the girls classrooms for four years running, letting all the children pat him. He enjoyed those outings.

Katie fell madly in love with Jasper, the cat who didn't run away when she pet him, the cat who let her lie on top of him, the cat who hung like a sack of potatoes when she picked him up, the cat who came in to her room every night to say good night. The first time she slept over at a friend's house I found Jasper sitting on her bed at seven o'clock, waiting for his little girl to come home and go to bed. He was a good, good cat.

Every night after the girls went to bed, Jasper ate his supper and came to sit with us on the sofa until it was time for bed. He always followed me to bed and slept with me. It was such a comfort to wake up with his hot little body pressing into me.

Jasper didn't choose me. Nor did I choose him. He just happened to be born to the litter of cats that was available when my sister called looking for cats as a gift for me. But he accepted me, was devoted to me and provided me with sixteen years of loyal companionship. He was always there, affectionately pressing his head into my shoulder or laying his paws across my lap. He sensed when I was upset and needed comfort. He didn't ask for much but he gave so much. He lived a good life and was very loved. In the last few years when I ran into someone I knew a long time ago, they would say, "Oh my gosh! You still have those cats?" Everyone who met Jasper remembered him. He was just that kind of cat.

On the second day I had Jasper, sixteen years ago, when I was twenty-six, I made a pact with him. I told him I would always love him and take care of him as best as I possibly could if he would be the best cat ever. We both made good on that pact. I wouldn't change a thing and I don't think he would either.

Jasper

April 21, 1993 - August 13, 2009