Escapades of a Bearcat

I haven’t spent much time talking about my cat in the past year or so. In fact, the last post I wrote was about my Persian cat, Ernest. Well, Ernest is gone. Gone forever! Don’t panic though, he’s not dead. He’s just living with my parents in California (which some Oregonians might think is the same as being dead – these Oregonians have a real beef to pick with my birth state for some reason that’s never been very clear to me). I really tried with Ernest. I gave it a full year, but no matter what I did Ernest hated me. If I walked into a room, he would walk out. If I came near him, he would cringe away from me. If I tried to pet him, he would start crying. Honestly, I felt like a monster. If anyone was the victim in our relationship, it was me! I’m pretty sure he was working a plan to psychologically torture me to the point that I would break, die and then he would eat me. I would not put it past the beast. But the straw that really broke this camel’s back was what happened when my cousin, Vera, came to visit me.

Vera flew into Portland, navigated the wild ways of Portland’s public transportation system and met me at the Courthouse downtown. From there we took my typical bus route home, arriving at my usual 5:30 pm. I walked in the door and Ernest immediately began to scuttle out of the room as was his custom, but as Vera came in behind me, Ernest paused. He stopped, turned around, and walked back into the room (which I was still standing in!) and sat down in a corner to gaze at Vera. This was odd. But at this point I had become somewhat used to the eccentricities of Ernest’s behavior and the fact that I would never understand him. Later, after Vera’s suitcase was in the guest room and we were all settled, we went downstairs to watch some TV. As soon as Vera sat down on the couch, Ernest walked over to sit at her feet and gaze adoringly up at her. I kid you not. Ernest had a look on his face that said he was looking at an angel. It was revolting. He even let Vera reach down to scratch his head! What was this??? I had owned this miserable rat for over a year and no matter what I did he treated me like scum, but he takes one look at this new person and he’s in love?? It was the last straw. Ernest and I were never going to get along and I was tired of finding excuses to stay away from my own house so that I wouldn’t have to go back to the second Cold War. I immediately called my mother (who had given me Ernest in the first place) and told her that I just couldn’t take it anymore. Something had to be done.

Some of you may remember (actually, I’m not sure if I wrote about this before, so some of you may be hearing about this for the first time), but we originally purchased Ernest in order to breed my mother’s Persian, Julie, and get a kitten for my sister. Well, during this time, Julie had produced three beautiful white and gray kittens (they all looked like little Julie clones). My sister planned to take two of them and my mother suggested that I take the third and Ernest could come to live at my parents’ house instead. This sounded perfect to me (surely I would have more luck getting a kitten to love me than a fully grown cat) and it wasn’t long before my parents were delivering my new kitten, Chloe.

Chloe is now almost two years old and I absolutely adore her. She was worth every miserable year of living with Ernest. Chloe is a 7 pound ball of gray/white Persian cuteness who looks remarkably like the ewoks from Star Wars. I always tell people that she’s a bear dressed up in a cat suit, which has led to her nickname of “bearcat” (although that’s certainly not her only nickname: Bear, Little Duck, Little Rabbit,  Little Monster, Biter, Pip, etc.). Chloe is the ideal cat. She does have a few…unfortunate habits, for instance if allowed to sleep in my bed she will slowly move from sleeping at my feet at the start of night to sleeping literally on my head by morning. But for the most part she is absolutely perfect.

What my family and I have found from now raising/living with 5 Persians over 3 households is that these are very peculiar little animals. Even more so than other cats (and that’s saying something, ‘cause we all know cats are pretty weird). For example, when Julie thinks it’s time for my parents to get up in the morning, she grabs a corner of the sheet and pulls the covers off them. Olive and Isobel (Izzy), my sister’s cats, have equally odd habits – Olive weighs herself on the bathroom scale every morning without fail and Izzy has to sleep with one paw resting on my sister’s hand.

While I like to think that Chloe is the best of the bunch, the truth is that she has her own odd little idiosyncrasies that seem pretty strange. Every morning Chloe and I follow the same routine and any deviation from it results in one majorly unhappy kitty. I wake up, make my bed and then open the bedroom door to let Chloe inside. Chloe saunters in and sits at my feet as I brush my teeth and then waits for me to sit down to floss my teeth and jumps in my lap. None of this may sound strange to you, but we haven’t gotten to the good part yet. As I shower Chloe sits calmly on the rug just outside the shower door. As soon as I exit the shower, Chloe darts in and sits in the shower for the same length of time I was in there. She rolls herself along the floor and rubs up against the walls until her fur is soaking wet and then finally walks out, her own shower complete.

Lately, she’s decided that it would be even better if the two of us would “shower” together. It only took one time jumping in while the water was still on for her to get the message that she should wait until that whooshing water sound was done to come in, but since that time she’s decided that we should at least share the shower space while I’m drying off. Every morning as I reach out to grab my towel I have to hold the door as tightly closed as possible in order to keep her from darting in. She has a very bad habit of rubbing up against my still wet legs and depositing loose fur everywhere. But it’s a constant battle and this morning she took our struggle to a new level. For the first time this week I managed to grab my towel without letting the little scamp in the shower, but in retaliation Chloe put on her crazy eyes and attacked the remaining towel on my towel rod as if it was somehow that towel’s fault. I opened the shower door to a confident, bug-eyed little monster who then calmly strolled into the shower for her morning ablutions. Very strange.

 

And so, cat tales (you have no idea how hard it was for me not to write “cat tails”) from here on out will feature my little bearcat, Chloe. The escapades of a bearcat are varied and quite fun. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.