Ted is back from overseas. He’s in a more cheerful frame of mind than he was when he left. On Election Night last year, as he sat amongst our merry crowd, he confessed that he’d moved to our Labor Stronghold here is order to covert as many people as possible to Liberal Policy. We asked how many converts he’d made.
‘None at all,’ was the rueful answer.
He accepted our teasing well enough that evening, but as Labor’s early weeks became months his cheery attitudes changed. He got the snarls. If any one told a funny story, he’d shout,
‘I hate it when people put people down!!!’
Yet he willingly put us down all the time. Gradually all his former friends departed his presence.
At the point at which he referred to me as a ‘cat lady’, I also stopped talking to him.
I don’t mind being teased. As an Aspergian, I’m so literal in conversation, it makes me an easy target and, well, now that I know about the Asperger’s, I can laugh at myself. Even though Ted explained that he has a habit of naming people, I felt that in his case the allegation was essentially malicious and a springboard for ridicule.
When I was a young mother with a few too many cats I was never described so. We lived in the country in those days. For a time after the first two cats came, I didn’t have a car and couldn’t get to the vet in the next bigger town.
Eventually (this was the Seventies), enough of our many visitors departed with a feline friend to relieve our problems. Initially in that place I’d decided not to have cats there, right up until the time that we were invaded by rats. Our cats then helped us.
When we finally got our cats, I discovered that Anna adores cats, thinks of herself as a cat person in a totemic sense.
Then, later, when I lived with my ex and his daughter in Bondi, we got the child a cat and allowed one litter. Princess was born into that first Bondi litter almost nineteen years ago. There were disruptions, money shortages, a house move and Squeak, Princess’s sister was pregnant by the time we’d finally found and shifted into the new flat.
Eventually, money matters improved somewhat and we had Squeaky and her kits de-sexed. Mama Tottie, already de-sexed, hadn’t wanted to move in with us. She found a place halfway between the old place and the new one.
The old place was situated in a back street with its own tiny private backyard. Cat’s Paradise.
In the newer street, in the bigger place, there was more communication between neighbours, some of whom we’d already met. Some of our new neighbours had children who told other children and pretty soon there were quite a few kids trooping around to the new place to visit and view the kittens. Many said they’d have loved to take one home, but pressures of a small flat away from the ground was a bit much.
This was the time that I realised that, unlike us kids who grew up in the bush in the Fifties, many city kids don’t know how to handle small living creatures. Fluffy toys and cartoon animals on TV aren’t the same thing at all. It’s the first time I thought that slowing down and sensitising oneself to a small creature’s centre of gravity, range of movement, freedom to breathe and to feel safe with person, might in some cases be a helpful teaching aid in terms of some childish emotional problems.
Again, it was an environment where there was a large circle of friends and most kits eventually found homes. Apart from Princess, their sagas don’t relate here.
I wasn’t called a cat lady in those days.
The fact is that I’m now an older person and I live alone.
Thus do appellations attach themselves via hostile attitudes.
I love to read about these creatures who developed with us and civilised some of us. I read all the time about this cat tribe who shares our Earth. One of my favourite books is Tribe of Tiger by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (which is only now on my booklist). Before all these things happened, I’d already read her book about The Gentle People, the Bushmen of South Africa before I read Tribe of Tiger.
Apparently when EMT was doing her anthropological studies in Africa, (and she is a most sensitive anthropologist), she also fell in love with Lions. Her book deals with how the cat tribe is different from all other animal groups in their playfulness and their independent terms of co-operation. She speaks of Lions, Tigers, the American Puma, as well as the domestic Moggie who apparently believes itself to be as big as any Tiger.
Which I believe is why, when there are several to deal with in a smallish space, the best human adaptation is to respect them and to move around them.
This most recent time when the cats accumulated was caused by serious dental illness and the loss of an ability to cope with the every day. Frightful really, but then my Dental Treatments were interrupted by Bureaucratic bullies and there’ll be legal redress eventually.
I didn’t sit around dotingly watching these recent ones breed or letting them run wild as the poor ladies in California did with their rats, saying that since they’d never had children they just loved to watch the little faces and so on. Check Barista & the 'all creatures great and small' post to discover how mad things can get in times of loneliness! I wondered, why the neighbours didn't get cats themselves, but it all went pretty mad much too fast.
I made the mistake of thinking that two of them were boys and they weren’t and …
A mistake I’ve got to take responsibility for. The latest lot weren’t intended, but then, as I explain in my opening blog, I later read my dream books, & how for some time in the previous years there’d been cats in my dream life asking me to hear them speak, and here it all is!
If I don’t have quite as many very close friends as previously, what I have here is a range of vivid and interesting personalities, (although it will also be very good when a few more of these little furry critturs find a home for themselves!).
Stanley’s sister Lucibelle would love to find her own place, for example, and three of her siblings have already done so. One of them, Feather, stars in a video clip which I think is pretty good. Her co-star is Sylvio’s brother Fred. The clip is on you tube and I haven’t learned much about the recent video stuff yet. I can post the address to anyone interested though.
1 comment:
The cat is so lovely.
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