I have only bought one pet, for myself, in my life. I was around forty years old, living in an apartment by myself, and decided that a cat would be the pet for me. I traveled quite a bit back then and it was not unusual for me to be out of town for a week or more. I didn’t want fish, birds, or a guinea pig, and a dog wouldn’t work. But a cat, with enough food, water, and litter can easily be left alone for long periods of time. Not that they like that, but after a few minutes of admonishment when you return, they’re your friend again.
But all cats are not the same. Some are overly aloof, providing little companionship. Others are mean, some hide all day long and others get fat and lazy. Some spend their waking hours plotting to escape and feel good about leaving you despondent, or better yet, crying your eyes out. Picking your perfect cat is a combination of knowing what you want and finding a cat to match. Not an easy task.
My cat journey started at a local SICSA (Society for the Improvement of Conditions for Stray Animals). I spent forty-five minutes meeting a variety of cats, some mean, some sleeping, most not adorable. Then I spotted a black and white cat perched all by himself up on the platform. I went over, and he immediately let me pet him and he started purring. I found out that he was one year old, which was perfect as I didn’t want a kitten and all those challenges. Took a while, but I found my cat.
My daughter and I picked up the cat a couple of days later to take him home. He had some kind of generic cat name that I didn’t like. So we talked about names for a bit and my daughter suggested Moses, a name from the song “Jessie” (by Joshua Kadison) that she was listening to on the radio. I was immediately smitten by this unique pet name. Very classy. I could nickname him “Mo” (although I rarely called him that), just like my middle name, Maurice, can be nicknamed “Mo”. And his black and white hair reminded me of Charlton Heston when he played Moses, as he came down the mountain with the Ten Commandments.
Moses started out as an apartment cat for the first few years. He would spend the days lounging in the sun or curled up on a couch. He always met me at the front door when I got home. But what was special was bedtime. The routine developed where I would get in bed, Moses would hop up, I would pull the covers up, he would go in head first, turn around and snuggle on my shoulder as I tucked in the covers. He purred, rapidly at first, then gradually slowed over several minutes. On a few occasions, we woke up the next morning in that exact position, but more often he would extract himself after ten or fifteen minutes and head off to whatever cats do all night.
Moses loved to explore. After we moved out of apartment living and into a rented house, Moses found a way to get into the walls. He would spend an hour or more crawling on the ceilings and ductwork, eventually finding his way back out, covered typically in gray dust, which would take him hours to lick off. On three of these explorations, he came back with a dead mouse, presumably of his own doing, given the number he found and killed in the backyard. But how he could do all this in the darkness of the interior of a house is the most amazing to me.
Perhaps the craziest thing I saw Moses do was be the family protector. One day my daughter was in the living room on one side of the couch. Max, a dachshund of advancing age prone to bite people, was on the other side. Moses was making his way from the kitchen to the living room when something outside caused Max to bark. Moses, obviously thinking Max might bite my daughter, flew across the room, jumped up on the couch and began to slap Max faster than the dog could see. After a flurry of punches, Moses leaped down, convinced he had saved the day. And for the next week, every time Moses and Max met, Moses would slap him a few more times for good measure.
Moses lived a long, good life and now rests under a tree in my former house in Bellbrook, where I buried him amid a stream of tears.
I still miss my “little buddy in the purring business”.
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