My parents called me recently to let me know that their cat had died. They have had a number of cats that have come and gone, and they don't normally call me to apprise me of the losses, but I knew this cat and I was rooting for it to live forever. Alas, it only made it to the halfway point of cat-life.
My parents had long ago adopted the psuedo-Native American ideal of naming their pets after the conditions under which said pets were gained. For example, they once found a dog on the side of the road, thus named it Roadie. I think that after sixty years of pet ownership, they got tired of thinking up names, and are only a few pets away from names such as Brown Dog or Cat #3. The recently deceased cat was originally found in an alley in the middle of a rain storm, so my parents named it Cat From The Rainy Alley.
No, I'm kidding. They called it Stormy.
My father happened across Stormy as a kitten. Not a kitten with extra-soft fur and wide, curious eyes, but a kitten with bare, pink, wrinkled skin and its eyes still shut. Fresh from the oven, and lying on the cement in the rain. Luckily, my father was raised on a farm and knew a thing or two about baby animals. He took the wee lump of skin home, and managed to keep him alive. My parents assumed that he was the runt of the litter, rejected by his mother, and left to die in the harsh environment.
As Stormy grew, it became apparent that something was wrong with him. He couldn't seem to do anything that my parents' other cats could do, try as he might. They took him to the vet and determined that because of either genetics or early-life hypothermia, the cat had partial blindness, extremely poor balance due to inner ear complications, and underdeveloped rear legs. Also, because of some deprived nursing instinct, the cat was constantly trying to nurse on people. If you pet him, he would purr and nestle up against you and... slowly... calmly... quietly... start nursing on a random portion of your skin. I can't even begin to describe what a bizarre sensation that is. And though there was never any official diagnosis in this regard, it appeared that the cat was profoundly stupid. Despite all of this, my parents told Stormy the same thing they told me many, many times: "You're goofier than bat shit, but we love you anyway."
Being the runt of the litter, nobody expected the cat to get very big. And he didn't get very big; he got huge. He was twice the size of a normal cat, which didn't match well with his underdeveloped abilities. He would saunter into the room, then suddenly bust his face on a table leg or wall, or maybe just fall over, because he had no idea where he was going. After he regained his bearings, he would notice that the other cats were jumping up onto the windowsill to bask in the sun, and pounce straight into the side of the wall because he believed he was a normal cat that could do normal cat-like things. Finally, dejected, he would seek human companionship and suckle on the nearest piece of exposed flesh. If you didn't know better, you'd think that my parents owned an alcoholic puma with a histrionic personality disorder.
The truly pitiful thing about Stormy was that he didn't know that he was 110% gimpy. For the duration of his life, he believed he was a tiny, lissome kitten that could pounce and bound like a healthy cat. He didn't know that he weighed forty pounds and could barely achieve two inches of vertical lift. He didn't know he was five years old and couldn't derive milk from the side of my arm. He was the Baby Huey of Felis cattus and you couldn't help but feel sympathy for him and his quixotic attempts to be a standard household cat.
In honor of his passing, I plan to create an animated television series. The show's star character will be a senile old lady who adopts a kitten that turns out to be a mentally challenged cougar. But the cougar doesn't know it's a cougar because the senile, old lady always treats it like a kitten. When bad guys and nogoodniks try to swindle the innocent old lady, the cougar will accidently foil them in his constant search for affection. Then, everything will return to normal.
"Oh, my, but we have some adventures, don't we Stormy?"
"ROAR!"
"That's my kitty."
