Ma vie avec Joe

Sunsets have always been my favorite. I loved to sit on top of the potting shed among the climbing roses and watch the sun go down behind the neighbors' fences. There were plenty of birds to study … but that was business. The sun going down was pure pleasure. It was orange and pretty and meant the grass would be dry, not all wet with the drizzle that happens when the fog flows in. The sun setting also meant Joe would be coming home from work soon and would be eager to see me and feed me. What joy he seemed to get when I rubbed up against his lower leg. Whether I was hungry or not, I always ate a little of the food he put out just in case he got the wrong message and stopped doing it.

Yes, for most of my life, I always thought positively of sunsets. That ended suddenly at my last visit to the vet. It was time for my annual poking with needles, which I don't like, and the warm massaging by the vet's hands which I adore. The lady vet used the word "sunset" but she applied it to "me." In her opinion I was close to the end of "my" day.

It's a fact we all have to face, I suppose, and certainly a moment that was important for me to think about — and I have with considerable effort. I now feel strongly that I shouldn't leave this earth without more people understanding my accomplishments and the obstacles I had to overcome to create the favorable and mostly comfortable home I've enjoyed. Yes, he could have given me more tuna water and more food with gravy in it and laid off a couple of those baths which I clearly didn't need, but those are small and forgivable points.

So with that preface, I decided through purrs, blank stares, occasional growls and hisses, some head butting, a few meows and much telepathy, to dictate my story to Joe, who has typed it into the computer. I could have done the typing myself as Joe knows perfectly well. Indeed, I have spent more than a few moments showing him I could get letters to appear on the computer screen usually while he was sitting right in front of it and concentrating on some unrelated topic. He never figured out I was trying to write, "My food bowl is empty." But I must agree with him that although I'm good at typing I'm just not very adept at correcting my typos.

I'll tell you all where I actually came from a little later, but for now let's go to that warm Sunday afternoon in July 2002. Joe had roasted a chicken and was busy enjoying it while sitting on a chair on his patio. I'd done some advance work scoping out his yard and noticed that there were no other cats and, thank god, no little barky dogs — which seemed to be everywhere else in the neighborhood. I was quite athletic at that time and could easily escape up and over a fence given the slightest indication of hostility.

Joe was distracted by the smell and taste of that roasted chicken and I must admit its aroma convinced me I needed to make my move.

With a sort of distant expression on his face, Joe looked up. A piece of chicken was still in his mouth and he just stared at me. I was maybe 10 feet away. He froze in that position and I figured that a few feet closer would still provide plenty of escape paths. I lifted my head, pointed my nose in his direction and gave my nostrils an exaggerated wiggle — as if sampling the air. I'm not sure if that was intentional or not, now that I'm thinking about it, but I hadn't eaten anything substantial in nearly two days and I really wanted some of that warm chicken. I sniffed again.

Yep, it worked. Up Joe went, grabbed a little clean sheet of paper, tore some chicken up and put it on the ground between us. I'd backed away a few steps just to make sure there was no funny business attached to his charity. But sure enough, he returned to his chair and it was obvious I was free to go taste le poule en papier. It was good. He's a decent cook. I tried to remember my manners, though, and ate slowly, savoring every morsel.

He looked down saw the empty paper and then gave me more — thigh meat this time. What heaven!

It turns out Joe at 52 had never owned a pet. That's why, in large part, I'm writing this commentary. So you might understand how much training I had to do with this fellow.

So that was the start. After I'd finished a second helping that was much more generous than the first, I walked a little closer to Joe, sat down — still facing him because you never know about humans — and started washing. I always begin with front paws to my face, then my chin, my chest, my sides, my back paws, hips and rump. It's then I noticed that Joe was staring at me with his mouth open again.

He looked at my backside carefully and came to the conclusion that I must be a Salinas street cat that got its tail whacked off. This caused a rush of sympathy from him to me and I did nothing to stop it. (I actually was born with a bit of a tail that he hadn't yet noticed, but we'll get to that in a little bit.)

Joe put away the chicken and decided to work in his rose garden for the rest of this fateful afternoon. I just hung around and watched him. Then, opportunity struck. I am indeed lucky.

As he was dead-heading a rose bush near the patio, I noticed a little motion over by the back fence. I suspected something like this when I was surveying the landscape but wasn't sure. With Joe watching I darted as fast as I could across the lawn into the back garden and BANG — got that mouse. I paraded with it just long enough for Joe to see what I'd done, watched him smile and then I jumped back over the fence into a neighbor's yard to enjoy the snack and not to be too much in Joe's face on the first day.

This little evidence of my usefulness made a profound impression on Joe. How was I supposed to know that he'd had to throw out all of his wooden spoons and bleach all of his utensils because a mouse had gotten into his kitchen drawers through a tiny hole in the back wall and chewed on some and piddled on the others?

And here's what he did next ... to be continued

After eating the roast chicken and catching the mouse on the Sunday we met, I returned to Joe's backyard on Monday, waited around under a rose bush and watched the birds flitting around Joe's feeder. Well, I actually caught one spitzy for lunch but had the good sense to eat it over in the neighbor's yard again. Bird feathers go everywhere even when you are careful and cats just aren't very good at hiding their trails.

When Joe came home after work, he looked out on the patio. I'd made sure my back was to him (as if I didn't know he was there — I heard the garage door open, for goodness sake). I was looking over at that spot where I caught the mouse.

He opened the sliding door and I turned around and gave him my friendliest "meow." Sure thing, off he went to the refrigerator and pulled out the leftover chicken. It was awfully nice of this guy to remove the bones and just give me the meat. So clearly he knew a few good things about pets. He wasn't much interested in his garden that evening and went about getting his own supper, watching television and not coming outside. (He likes the nature shows and I have a story to tell you about that but it will have to wait until later.)

On the following day, Joe left more of that chicken outside before he went to work, I forget where I was in the morning. But the food was there when I showed up around noon. And I decided to sit in the warm sunshine and enjoy his yard again. It was really very beautiful with lots of private places to hide and do those things we all do in private places. That's when I first experienced the potting shed and the mass of climbing pink roses growing up there. It was a near perfect place to look at life in that neighborhood — unseen and unspoiled and unquestionably good camouflage to whack birds. I'm essentially a white cat with very large, irregular black patches. When I hide underneath shrubbery in bright sunshine, I'm pretty much invisible.

When Joe came home this next day, he saw me on the patio, put his hand on his chin, shook his head, and disappeared in the kitchen. He returned with some sardines on a paper plate. Apparently, the chicken was gone. Sardines aren't something you usually feed to cats but Joe didn't know that and the gesture was generous and genuine so I accepted the silvery little critters with grace and gratitude. I did like their fishiness but could have done with less salt.

Cat food appeared the next evening and a steady stream of culinary delights, some tastier than others, has been present every day ever since.

I heard Joe in the house that week describing his progress to a friend on the phone.

"I decided to go buy some real cat food," he said. "I went to the grocery store, stood in the pet food aisle and was just overwhelmed. There are so many choices! I wondered whether Princess (that's the word he used when he was referring to me now) would prefer the 'Country Home Platter' or the 'Mariner's Feast?' So I bought four cans of each. I also bought her these cute kibbles. One is shaped like a chicken drumstick, one is a fish, one is like a rib-eye steak, and one is a little white egg."

I'm not sure how he decided on the name "Princess." Perhaps it was my manners. I prided myself with control, enjoyed keeping myself well groomed and — this is the one that probably did it — striking graceful poses every time I sat down, especially if he was looking.

Joe was in the garden on the following Sunday. Next to his chair was a stool which he used as a sort of end table. He stopped his work to drink some iced tea and take a break. So he was sitting reading a book and I decided that that stool was the perfect place for my next lesson.

Although we had been interacting for the past eight days, we never had any physical contact. Joe had never even scratched my head and likewise I kept my distance. I jumped up onto the stool and quickly laid down. He glanced over at me and kept very still. I looked away, feigning disinterest. Joe went back to his book.

So, as he was reading "Out of Africa" by Karen Blixen, I thought I'd give him a little training on "Out of Salinas" by me. Concentrating on the Danish writer's pretty English prose, Joe didn't notice that my paw was slowly approaching the back of his hand. It was the other one that held up the book. This one was just uselessly resting on the chair arm. I gradually placed my paw on the back of his hand. He tensed up. Then I extended my claws only slightly and made contact with his flesh. I gently pulled his free hand closer and closer to me and somehow placed it on the back of my head. He made the connection. One can easily read a book and scratch a cat's neck at the same time — it takes no special talent. I started purring as loudly as I could and he smiled. Apparently, he'd never heard a cat do that or at least never in response to anything he'd initiated. I could tell he liked it.

Joe figured out something else on that second Sunday and I have to give him credit for making another connection. He was proving to be a fast learner. As he was getting ready to go inside for the night, he looked down at my bowl of kibbles on the patio. He liked to look inside it throughout the day and often rushed into the house to fill it up whenever it was slightly empty. So I decided to send him a strong message.

When he looked down on this day, he'd noticed I'd eaten all the cute little drumsticks, rib eye steaks and fish but left in the dish all of those lousy tasting eggs. I'm a cat. We're carnivores. We want meat. No exceptions. Feed the eggs to a dog! He seemed to have gotten this message and the next time he filled the dish, it was with plain ole Wiskas — the same thing I grew up on.

And then, here's what he did next … to be continued

After our first week together, I stopped scouring the neighborhood for places to hang out. Joe's yard was Eden. In truth — and somewhat verified by Joe during a summer walk in the neighborhood one year later, I was born a few blocks away in a detached garage toward the back of a yard. We, a group of about eight or ten of us — some related, some not, called that cold garage home. It smelled of ancient motor oil, dirty pesticides, moldy newspapers and well, foul things —dragged in by my housemates and abandoned. A carport on the side of the garage with some broken lawn furniture was also part of this sad domicile.

At any rate, my old man was a mean cuss and the top cat in the garage. He treated my mother and my aunts like they were disposable. We kittens shut the hell up whenever he came around and lived in fear — usually somewhere in the cobwebbed shadows.

In retrospect, this former life helped me develop an ability to be almost anywhere I wanted to be and be invisible. This tactic came in handy several times later and I'll tell you about those scary instances soon.

The gray haired lady who took care of us, visited us every day but rarely did much other than put Wiskas in a dish the size of a bird bath and expect us all to eat from the same plate. I don't think she was allowed to drive a car anymore and that's why the garage was all ours.

One of the lady's younger friends took me and my sister on a car trip once when we were very young. I don't remember much about it though I do recall some awful smells and a weird sleepiness afterward. I felt sore, too, for a couple weeks like somebody bit me on the bottom.

I suppose in her feeble way the lady kept an eye on us but I think there were just too many of us to garner the special individual attention most cats need. I remember playing with her and my sister a lot when we were kittens but then as we got older she seemed less interested. She coughed a lot, too, which has always made me a bit jumpy — even to this day.

It was after a morning when she didn't quite put enough food out for all of us to eat that my old man crawled home in a rotten mood. For some reason, he'd decided that I was his target that day. I swear I was just sitting there with my sister watching the others eat when he came over to me, growling at first and then hissing, spitting, and swatting me with his paw.

Who needs that, right?

So I said good bye to my mother who understood my need to leave and licked my sister's face and took off on my adventure. I never returned.

Of course, I was clever enough to catch birds and mice, and God knows there were enough rats in that Salinas neighborhood to feed a pride of lions.

It was my luck that I only spent a week or two roving around before I wandered into Joe's rose garden and met perhaps the biggest sap in town. He fussed a lot over inconsequential things in those early days. And, if he wanted to call me 'Princess" I could live with that.

So the weeks went by and I took up an increasingly happy residence in Joe's yard, sleeping now on one of the patio chairs or, if it was particularly cold, up on the roof next to the warm chimney. I lived outside and he lived inside. I even let him pick me up now. He seemed to be fascinated by my ever-increasing belly and my stubby tail. I made sure I purred loudly so he'd know it was OK.

Whenever I caught a mouse or a rat, some part of it — usually the crushed bloody head, tail or an occasional paw was there for him to notice. It was my equivalent of a punched time card. I was doing my job and earning my keep. He buried these "less edibles" in the garden near a rose bush and seemed pleased with the arrangement. He was startled at first at just how many rodents he was unknowingly sharing his life with.

One day, Joe showed up with this bright pink "Hello Kitty" blanket and put it on one of those patio chairs. He pointed at me and pointed at it, and said something like "Up. Up. Princess. Up."

I mean really! "Up?" Poor guy.

He quickly learned he didn't need to say anything like that. I would go "Up" when I felt like going "Up" and when there was something special in it for me to go "Up." Pleasing him, reinforcing his congenial behavior still happened to be a priority at the time, so "Up" I went and struck an adorable pose.

Then he pulled out of his pocket a black leather collar studded all over with rhinestones and one tiny, tinny bell. He put it around my neck and I didn't struggle too much at first. Then I heard the sound of that darn bell every time I moved or the wind blew. I knew it would spoil my hunting days forever.

That same morning — thank you Johann Sebastian Bach — Joe happened to be listening to the Cantata BWV No.4 "Christ lag in todesbanden." It was turned up rather loud so he could hear it on the patio. The addition of my little, off-pitch, off-beat noise-maker joining that fine chorus and period ensemble was just as irritating to Joe as it was to me. With one quick motion, Joe yanked the bell off the collar.

The Bach was indeed fortuitous, "Christ lay to death in bondage." I tolerated the collar for another minute or so and as soon as Joe disappeared I backed out of it easily. It landed under the patio chair. He tried to put it on me again a little later but I wasn't as docile as I was before and squirmed all over the place. He just gave up and stuck it in a drawer somewhere. It reappeared years later, but that's another story.

And then, here's what he did next … to be continued

Every month in those days, usually on a Saturday or Sunday morning, Joe spread out all of his bills and letters on the dining room table, plugged in a calculator and proceeded to scribble things onto this and that, tap away on that noisy machine that printed out a long curling tally, and then stuff one piece of paper into another. He'd drag his tongue over the edge, then press it shut with his fingers. I never completely understood why he did these things but they seemed to capture his total attention.

One weekend, as he was balancing his check book, tapping at that noisy machine, licking his envelopes and putting stamps on them, he heard something unusual. It was a grumbling-like sound that he hadn't ever heard before.

"Is that the refrigerator?" he asked himself. It was loud then quiet, loud then quiet. "Is that the dimmer switch on the light?" No. He put his ear to the calculator. No. He listened carefully at the window behind him. No, not coming from outside. It was coming from … under the table. He looked on the floor and there was nothing there but the Persian carpet. "What could it possibly be?" Then his eyes opened wide. "You know," he thought, "It sounds like snoring!"

I mentioned before that Joe has this sliding door that goes out to his patio. He likes to leave that door wide open when he's home. It airs out the house and allows the smell of his many roses to waft into the dining and living room.

Joe was soon to discover what most cat owners know although they may have never heard the word for it. We're crepuscular. That's from the French word for "twilight." But in this sense, it's used to describe our activity level. In normal cats, especially those that live outdoors, we rise before the sun goes up and look for something to eat. We're active until about two hours after sunrise and then we seek out a comfortable place (not too bright, not too warm, not too easily discovered) to sleep through the day. We wake up again in late afternoon, famished, and want to eat something in a hurry. Then we bounce around and play as the sun goes down and stay active to hunt some night creatures. Then about two hours after dark we look for a nice warm spot to rest for the coldest part of the night.

This said, Joe told all of his visitors — especially those nice ladies that often came to visit, the same ones who brought me toys and treats and who always made a big fuss over me — that "Princess" was an outdoor cat. He would feed me, see that I had a good place to sleep but I would not be allowed inside. They shook their heads when they heard this. Remember, Joe had never owned a cat before.

So there he was working away at the dining room table with its heavy cloth draping over the edge onto the chair seats. There was the sliding door — wide open. There I was absolutely exhausted from the hunt and ready for a warm, dark, safe spot. I'd been up and prowling the neighborhood for nearly four hours. I have told you all that I learned how to be invisible.

As Joe narrowed down the source of the noise, he lifted the tablecloth and discovered me — all four paws up in the air, mouth a bit opened and sound asleep on the chair next to his. Sorry about the snoring. It stopped when I rolled over. He wasn't sure what to do next. He had visions of me going bonkers, dragging the tablecloth and all that rested on it onto the floor, of me ripping up all the upholstery on his wing-backed chairs, of me knocking over and breaking the Kenyan wood carvings on the mantle that he'd dragged out when he started reading "Out of Africa."

But here's what actually happened. I felt the tablecloth move. Lifted my head up, looked at Joe through squinting, half-asleep eyes, rolled over, exhaled loudly and was soon snoring again.

It doesn't sound like much of a turning point in Joe's life, but it was. He'd mostly lived alone and thought he liked it that way. Now, having me in the house, it made him feel entirely different. There was someone else around. Not intrusive, not much bother and yet, someone to talk to and someone who would listen to his mumbling, cussing, singing, noise making and classical music. (When he starts the day with a baroque soprano, I go outside. I've learned to prefer Debussy.)

Again, it was lucky for him that I was also a talker. And whenever he turned to me and started speaking, I quickly answered him, although I'm not certain he always caught the direction I was trying to turn the conversation.

Frequently, when something was not as I wanted it and Joe was busy, I'd stand in front of him and simply stare at him. My brainwaves said, "OK, let's review the things I could ever possibly want. Food — have some. Water — bowl is full. Door — wide open. Scratch on head — just had that. Let me see. What might it be?"

How about "Follow me?" I usually can get him to stop whatever he is doing and look into what I want to show him.

On one such occasion, I led him outside where he looked around quickly and shouted.

"It's the hose. I left it on. Oh, what a good kitty." Another scratch on the head.

Personally, I don't care how he wastes water. The yard was flooded. I wanted to walk across it and I do not appreciate getting my feet wet in the process. He needs to know that.

Eventually, after hundreds of "Listen, Repeat; Listen, Repeat" language exercises, Joe came to understand my most frequent expressions. Indeed, he knows when I say, "Yes," "No," "I want out," "Thank you" and "God d****t, cut that s**t out!"

Since my comfy snooze on Joe's dining room chair ended uneventfully – he started clearing up the papers and putting away things the commotion of which disturbed my sleep, I jumped down on the floor and without looking back went outside for a drink of water. I could feel Joe's eyes on me and knew he must be thinking, "No harm done." And indeed there hadn't been. That was my point.

As I was drinking from a water dish he placed outside in the garden which the birds loved to sip from – oh, the taste of bird in that water is … heavenly. I heard Joe sigh loudly and slide the door closed.

And this is what he did next … to be continued next Saturday.

Follow Joe Truskot on Twitter @truskot_salnews #salinas and like his Facebook.com/joetruskot page.

My comfy snooze on Joe's dining room chair ended uneventfully. He started clearing up his papers and putting away things — the commotion of which woke me. I jumped down and without looking back went outside for a drink of water. I could feel Joe's eyes on me and knew he must be thinking, "No harm done." And indeed there hadn't been.

As I was lapping up water from a large ceramic bowl he placed in the garden, I heard Joe slide the door closed. I didn't bother to turn around as, truthfully, I was too distracted by the taste of that delicious water with its slight hint of bird.

My introduction to indoor living at Joe's had to be gradual. "Let's not rush and spoil a good thing," I thought, and the days uneventfully passed.

One afternoon, Joe was sitting and still making his way through "Out of Africa" — he's a slow reader and often mumbles words out loud, especially those that begin with "Ng" and "Mb."

At any rate, he was inside sitting in his big leather chair and the sliding doors were open and I was on the patio and I just walked inside and laid down leaning my head on his foot. I exhaled loudly and stayed there. He did nothing for the longest time and I was all set to shoot right out that door if there was the slightest indication of his panicking.

Eventually, I moved my head away and he got up to fill his coffee cup. I watched him for a minute. Then, a spitzy flew right into a picture window and I took off outside to see if I could grab an easy snack. I almost had it but the bird recovered too quickly and flew out of reach. I didn't go back inside but later that day sat beside Joe as he was pulling weeds. Life was good.

In Salinas, we often get an early rain in October. Although we welcome rain whenever it arrives, no one is ever ready for these sudden showers. That was the case with me and Joe.

When the rains started to pelt the grass with blobs of water, I jumped up on the dusty work bench in the potting shed and decided that was a convenient place to watch the wind blow things around.

It was early evening when the sliding door opened.

"Princess, Princess," Joe called.

"Meooooooow," I answered back and watched him come outside in the downpour and run across the yard to the shed.

"Meow" I said when he appeared next to me.

"Let's go in the house. OK?" he asked.

I mention this because he started this come-out-of-the-rain thing. Not me.

Joe lifted me up and tucked me under his arm and across the wet grass he ran.

The patio has an aluminum roof which makes a thunderous racket when rain falls. We sat together on a patio chair, me sitting on his lap now. He soon discovered our body temperature is 104 degrees normally so if we sit long enough on a human being we give off heat. He liked that. We stayed there for awhile watching the roses and trees sway in the wind. Then, he got cold and carried me inside.

We played together for a while on the living room floor. By now, just about every friend of his brought me a little toy so there was a large collection to choose from. I preferred the furry mice with catnip stomachs. He tossed them and I rushed after them and caught them sometimes in mid air.

We got tired of doing that rather suddenly. He sat quietly for awhile and just watched me explore the living room.

The TV was in the big bedroom and that's where Joe went. I followed him. I didn't know how to tell him that I had to go … well, you know … use a litter box. But search as I did, I couldn't find one. So I jumped up on the bed and sat on the corner with him which he seemed OK with as his attention was on the TV.

I turned to him and uttered my "I've – got – to – go – to – the – bathroom" meow but for all intents and purposes I might have recited the Preamble of the United States Constitution. His cat lingua was deficient.

Finally, I couldn't hold it any longer. I was busting. I jumped off the bed, went to the bedroom door and asked him once again to let me out. No response. So I went inside the closet and relieved myself.

There was a terrible commotion. Many harsh words came out of this fellow. He grabbed me and rushed me to the sliding door and meanly put me down on the bricks outside — still shouting at me.

To tell you that I felt bad about this incident wouldn't express to you how embarrassed and humiliated I was. I had disappointed Joe — that I know. But he put me on the pedestal, told everyone he came in contact with — even those who don't like cats and were being polite — what a godsend his little "Princess" was.

The facts are there for all to see. I'm a mammal. Mammals drink water. Then, mammals have to pee. That's how it works. We can live together comfortably but that has to be understood.

After I was tossed outside, Joe got a pail of warm water and some Spic 'n' Span and cleaned up the place where I peed. Awhile later, Joe came outside with a fluffy towel, threw it roughly on one of the chairs and went inside again, closing the sliding door loudly, as if that was supposed to make matters better.

I spent the rest of that rainy night on a chair on the patio. I was left out there to feel terrible about my accident.

Yet, all things pass. That's what I've learned over the course of my lifetime. And in just about every circumstance, the enormity of the offense wears away.

The next morning, Joe put food out, then disappeared in his truck. When he returned, about an hour or so later, he came out onto the patio with a large plastic litter box under his arm and a box of litter with the word "EXTREME" written on it in big letters. You can count on him to overdo just about everything.

So I sat patiently watching him open the box of litter, pour its contents into the plastic tub, smooth it out with his little plastic rake and point to it — indignantly saying "Do you know what this is? What it's for?"

I stayed cool. Always be classy when faced with people who want to rub your nose in mistakes you made. I casually stepped inside the box, squatted, peed, stared off into space, turned, smelled and covered it all up — exaggerating my action and making an unnecessarily large mound on top. I stepped outside of the box and walked into the garden with no further comment. If I had a tail, it would have been raised high. I could feel Joe's smile on my back.

The litter box was placed in a low traffic area inside the house and I rarely used it. Rarely, I say — until the last few months, when I seem to be in and out of it all day and all night long.

Then, here's what he did next … to be continued

I had just finished a terrific meal — Fancy Feast's Grilled Tuna with Gravy — when I felt Joe staring at me. He'd watched me eat breakfast for at least four months but on this day he seemed particularly focused on my stomach. He was apparently concerned about its increasing size. The gears in Joe's head were spinning fast. I had this horrible feeling that this was not going to end well.

For the next few days, he kept touching my stomach and groaning. Then one day, out of bloody nowhere, he grabbed me and shoved me into this cardboard box that he'd cut holes in.

I was so scared. I started crying.

I'd heard him use the word "vet" on the telephone a bit earlier that day and I was certain that that had something to do with me. There was also a later phone call where he told one of his friends "I'm not going to raise a litter of damn kittens" which confused me to no end.

Sometimes, when things go down faster than you can manage, the only thing you can do is cry like a baby. And as soon as I realized the cardboard box thing wasn't a game, and it and me got put inside a stuffy car, I knew there was going to be trouble.

Every three seconds, I let out a pathetic cry. Joe was timing them! I continued for what seemed like hours but was in fact about ten minutes until we got to the vet's office.

Throughout this ordeal, Joe kept saying softly, "Princess, everything is going to be OK, darling. It's OK, sweetie pie. My honey bunch. My precious little girl." But I knew it wasn't going to be OK and that he was in for a shock — a really big one. It would be one of those moments when a human's face turns all red and his or her eyes bulge out.

Joe carried the box with me inside it into the waiting room. He opened it up and sat me on his lap. I was too scared to do anything so I shut up. There was this large blue bird in a cage with enormous feet and talons. It had this gigantic beak and its squawk was louder than a flock of crows. Its owner was a woman who kept staring at me trying to get Joe involved in a conversation. I was fine on his lap but that noisy bird upset the sick dog on a leash across from us whose owners, a man and his son, kept trying to calm down. This critter was missing whole patches of fur from his back. I didn't know what was up with that but I certainly did not want that disease. I leaned up against Joe and pretended to be invisible.

Sometime later, a young lady handed Joe a clipboard and told him to fill the forms out. He scribbled the best he could as I was now attempting to disappear inside his arm pit. The further away from this group I could get the better.

She came back shortly and said, "Follow me."

Joe carried me into this tiny room. She closed the door and we just sat there. Joe let me explore the exam table and then walk around on the floor a bit. I must have smelled about 20 different cats. It was as confusing as the perfume counter at a department store. (Of course, I don't know what that would smell like but I've heard people talk.) The door opened and in walked the lady vet. She put me on the table and said, "Hello Princess." And began to press her warm hands on my neck and then on my back and then on my belly and then my hips and then my … she stopped suddenly.

"Princess?" she said looking over at Joe. "You better pick another name. This is a neutered male."

"It can't be," Joe replied. "All my friends said it was a female. These people have owned cats for years! They all agreed she was a she."

"No way," she laughed. "In a male, the anus is about an inch from the penis. In a female it's much closer. Joe, this is a very well fed boy kitty." She squeezed open my mouth which I still don't care for and looked at my teeth. He appears to be maybe a little older than a year or so."

The gentle vet gave me a round of shots which pricked at first. I got something for leukemia, feline AIDS, and rabies.

"He's got fleas, too. So buy something for them at the front desk," she said firmly.

She scratched my head. "Goodbye. Boy Truskot. You're lucky to have found a good home." And then said to Joe. "You'll need to buy a proper cat carrier, too. They're not that expensive and you'll find you'll use it a lot. Do get something for those fleas. You won't want them in your house."

Well, there it was. Joe's face was still red — he thought he was knowledgeable about nature but certainly got this wrong. It wasn't entirely his fault the mistake was made. He never owned a cat, never ever had a pet. And his friends just all went along.

I cried all the way home again too, this time thinking, "What if he doesn't want me anymore? What if he only wants a female? Winter is coming and I hate being cold and outside."

So, when we got back to the house. Joe opened the box and I jumped out. He went to the cupboard and put some fish flavored treats in a bowl and set them next to my indoor water bowl.

"Good kitty," he said. Well, that was encouraging.

I just looked at him though and still felt sad. It wasn't at all my fault. I always preferred the attention I got from his lady friends — way more than those noisy guy pals of his." I was a natural born ladies' man.

I finished my treats and then just sat and stared at Joe as he examined all the supplies he bought. They included Frontline, flea powder, a flea collar, a flea comb, and — boy, do I have a story coming your way about this last item — flea shampoo.

"Well" he said "What am I going to call you? Max, Rocket, Dil, Rex, No." He opened the sliding door for me and I thought it was best to go outside but I hesitated just a moment and looked up at him sympathetically. I really do appreciate all he's done for me so I gave him a head butt on the leg and headed for the door. What could I do if others jumped to the wrong conclusion?

"C'mon, buddy, let's go outside," he said and I did. "My buddy, hmmm. Buddy is a good name."

And this is what he did next … to be continued

During the next few days, Joe changed.

Now that he realized I was a neutered male and that it was his, and his friends’ fault I was misidentified, he felt he had to rectify the situation. So he chose to address me in a deeper voice!

"Well, Bud," he’d say. "What's on your agenda today?"

When his visitors came by to see me, he told them. "Oh, my Buddy. He's such a jock. He doesn't just walk around the couch to get to the other side, he runs in a straight line up and over the couch and on into the bedrooms. Why just the other day," he continued, "I watched Bud walk along the top of the fence boards. Not the side railing, mind you, but the very top end of the boards. And you know what he figured out? If he does this over by the garage at night, he's out of range of the motion detector and he can surprise whatever creature happens to be in the back yard without the light coming on!"

All of which just happens to be true but Joe thought it was necessary to emphasize my athletic prowess — he only knew half of what I could do, and often did.

Yes, I had endured the endless "Princess" gushing and now I was well into my butchification program.

The ‘Hello Kitty’ pink flannel baby blanket was replaced by a colorful, but badly tattered, weaving from Mexico. The rhinestone collar continued to stay in the drawer where he parked a few weeks back. (It reappeared months later but I’ll tell you about that in a few weeks.) My plastic food dish was replaced by earthenware bowls, hand thrown in his pottery class.

Halloween approached and Joe's extra effort to shore up his new understanding of me resulted in his selecting a tough guy costume for me. I became John Wayne. My cowboy gear came complete with a hat for my head and a blue bandanna tied around my neck. He’d actually spent time looking for a six-shooter and holster that would fit around my narrow hips but couldn't find them in Salinas. Ditto four leather boots made for cat feet.

I amazed myself with how much I could put up with for free room and board.

Several of the early trick-or-treaters laughed at my costume but then so many of them started coming to the door that Joe couldn't find time to adjust my hat every second. He didn't see me pull it off and swat it under the couch.

I liked the bandanna though and purposely walked about the living room like I was bow-legged from riding a horse all day, much to everyone's delight and laughter. I liked the attention and the occasional scratches on the head and, you know, my John Wayne wasn't half bad.

Eventually, I rode shotgun for Joe by sitting on top of his wing back chair and policing the strangers as they came for free candy. A couple of the trick-or-treaters brought along their dogs which I didn't appreciate so I jumped off the chair back and retired to the bedroom for the rest of the evening.

A few days later, Joe and I were watching television in the big bedroom. I was never particularly interested in TV as there were no smells associated with it. But I enjoyed just laying around next to Joe as he looked at the exotic scenery.

I mentioned earlier that he loved nature programs. He often made me snooze through endless hours of whales and porpoises — mammals who gave up their comfy life on land to eat fish (good!) and live in water all the time (bad!). They couldn't go back now even if they tried. I mean really — have you seen the elephant whales on the beach at Año Nuevo? Graceful isn't a word I’d use!

Then there were millions of penguins. They may technically be birds, but waddling around on ice sheets and diving into frozen oceans — real birds just don't do that.

One night, for some reason, Joe thought I should pay particular attention to a program about African lions.

"Look, Bud," he said and held my head toward the TV screen. He actually forced me to watch.

"See, they're your cousins," he said.

Then, this big male lion started vocalizing, calling to others in the pride in that guttural and growling dialect we recognize as a roar. It shook the entire bedroom. Yes, they’re my cousins and I know enough of their brutal language to understand they weren't saying, "Hello honey pie."

Joe let go of me and my eyes stayed glued to the TV screen. It was riveting at first. And then this monster of a male, this enormous beast started his monologue. "C’mon gang, let's go kill and eat the guy taking these pictures ... and that fat house cat back in his truck." That I couldn't take anymore.

I turned to Joe and he saw the frightened look on my face.

Joe started laughing — laughing! I was too scared to do anything but jump down off the bed, run to the dining room and hide on a chair underneath the table cloth. I had nightmares for a week after that and avoided that room even when the TV was off. I still haven't watched another nature program.

And then, here's what he did next ... to be continued

Joe was on the patio still making his way through "Out of Africa." I told you he was a slow reader. He was at the part when Karen Blixen gets sick and has to go back to Denmark and the coffee plantation is in peril. He looked sad so I thought I’d cheer him up.

I was lying underneath the birdbath in the dappled light that makes me almost invisible. When this plump little spitzy flew down for a drink and a quick bath, I waited patiently and just when she took off, I leaped into the air, turned upside down, grabbed her with my front paws, shoved her in my mouth, and landed gracefully on all four feet. I trotted back to the patio — spitzy secure in my jaws and very much alive-o. I pranced over to Joe to show him what I just caught.

"Cheeep! Cheeep!" the bird cried, immobilized and held securely in my fangs.

Then it happened.

"Oh, poor little birdie," Joe said.

Immediately, I knew this wasn't going to go like I thought it would.

Joe grabbed me and squeezed my jaws open. The spitzy flew across the yard.

I struggled free and raced after it, but she’d taken off quickly and flew a little too high to grab again.

I ran back to Joe and for the first time in our history together raised my voice to him.

"You let it go," I shouted. " You jerk!" I raced back to the lawn only to return quickly. "I can't believe it. You let it go. I caught it and was going to share it with you and you ... let ... it ... go."

I went off fuming, scaled the 7-foot-back fence and disappeared for the rest of the day in Old Wes’ yard, next door.

Joe looked for me around sunset but I was too angry to return. He peeked over the fence and saw me sitting on a table next to Wes who was looking at a magazine while scratching my head. Served Joe right.

The next day, we had a conversation. This little chat is one many in my pride have had to have with their owners. It goes like this, "I’m a cat. I kill birds. It's what I do."

As obvious as that is to us, it needs to be understood by all cat owners. If a human wants something dull, harmless and domesticated, go get an ungulate.

Alas, humans are only half logical. They think by anthropomorphizing pets, we’re going to drop our instincts and behave like them.

If Joe didn't want me to chase birds, why was he tempting me by filling the bird feeder every few days. Bird seed is what we cats refer to as "bait."

I think the discussion was worth the effort as that was the last bird Joe pried out of my strong jaws.

That was back in my prime when my jaws were in fact strong. This morning, for instance, I brought a bird into the house that had crashed into a window and I managed to catch. I don't know how it happened but once I got it in the living room my old jaws were just too weak to hold on to it, especially with all that fluttering. It got loose and was banging into windows, perching on picture frames and clinging onto blinds. It created more noise than even I expected. Joe is accustomed to loose birds in the house by now and has worked out a quick little maneuver using a broom that coaxes the bird into the wild blue yonder — much to its delight. Yes, it's been awhile since I have been able to leave a nice pile of feathers behind the philodendron.

It's now time to talk about the front yard. It's quite different from the one in the back and is routinely trafficked by outsiders — human, canine, avian, and feline. The front lawn has been the scene of several incidents which involve me and in their different ways were terrifying.

Cars and trucks rumble and race up and down Chaparral Street all day and a good part of the night. People walk dogs, push strollers, and accompany children heading off to the elementary school around the corner. There's always lots to see and smell. It's busier than other streets in the neighborhood because it's a short cut between North Main and Natividad Road. Joe knows its danger to pets from personal experience — having nearly squashed two Chihuahuas who darted out in front of him on his way home from work one night.

Part of a cat's attraction to the street is our insatiable desire to smell car tires. And there are lots of them in our neighborhood. The closest comparison that humans might understand is their own universal delight in learning the most horrendous things about the most impeccable people — "He was discovered doing what with whom?"

Joe frequently lectured me about crossing the street. "Stay on this side," he would tell me, "don't you go over there."

I mostly ignored Joe as you probably guessed.

One evening, he looked outside and spotted me under one of the neighbor's trucks ... across the street.

"Lots of interesting smelling tires over here," I’d been thinking.

Then Joe came to the curb and called, "Buddy, Buddy, come back here." Which, of course, I heeded not and continued smelling each tire. There were a lot of cars and the story the tires told me was getting really exciting.

"Get over here," Joe interrupted.

"Well, if he had just left me alone," I thought, "I would have gotten bored eventually and returned."

A car sped by between us, going faster than it should have.

Joe's face got pale.

A pickup truck rattled passed from the other direction with a motorcycle right behind it.

Sniff, sniff. Oh, somebody's in heat. Oooo, somebody's after her.

"Get over here right now!" Joe said in his lowest, meanest and most exasperated voice.

So I trotted back to the curb. Stopped. Looked up the street. Stopped. Looked down the street. Coast clear. I sauntered back to Joe uttering a cute little teasing, "Meow" as I walked past him and headed toward the house.

Joe followed me, opened the front door and we both went in. We sat together for a while but it was warm out that night and I didn't want to stay inside. I convinced Joe to let me out in the back yard again and he went to bed.

Around 2 in the morning, a car slammed on its brakes, skidded across the pavement, and crashed into several parked ones across the street. Joe bolted upright in bed and in a panic shouted, "Buddy!"

Here's what Joe did next … to be continued

The noise from the car crash in the middle of the night wouldn't stop. Joe jumped up from his bed and peeked between the blinds to see what happened.

A car was sitting in the middle of the street in front of the house — upside down. Its lights were on but pointing out in different directions. Its wheels were still spinning around — out of sync with the incessant and very loud rap music. A confused cloud of dust, steam and exhaust swirled about the crash site as if looking for a safe place to settle down.

From the passenger's side window which faced the house, Joe watched as an arm and then slowly the rest of a man struggled to climb out of the car. The CD player blasted out full volume with the bass turned up and the speakers vibrating the night air and the ground itself. "Wahumff, fump, fump; wahumff, fump, fump; wahumff, fump, fump … endlessly."

The man extricated himself and leaned against the crashed car for a moment, then he staggered a bit. His entire body shook for a second. unexpectedly, he punched the side of the car, scolding it for its reckless behavior and demonstrating the level of his intelligence. He shook himself again and found his bearings. He stood firmly upright on the pavement, apparently sorting out the situation. He looked up the street and then down the street and then took off running toward Main Street with a "feets do yo’ stuff" impetus.

Joe grabbed the phone in the bedroom, dialed 911 and reported the accident. He put on his flip-flops then opened the front door and went out to investigate.

"Meow," I said as he stepped out on the front sidewalk. I thankfully had been searching the rooftop for a rat I had smelled earlier and was well away from the street, but I saw the entire thing happen so Joe wasn't just making this column up.

"You just stay up there," Joe said brusquely and hurried over to see if anyone else was in the car.

Of course, I had no intention of getting involved. I’m a cat. We run from accidents ... too!

The scene was surreal though. The car lights were on, each shining in a different direction. Fluids were dripping onto the pavement. The air smelled of anti-freeze, burned tires, strangers, and gin 'n' juice. And the CD player droned on and on, blasting out rap. It was the first time Joe ever listened long enough to hear the singer's actual words. "I took my pole and I shoved it in …" and so on with absolutely nothing else left to the imagination.

Two teenagers who lived across the street also came out in their pajamas to investigate the accident.

"Is anyone in there?" one asked Joe as he tried to see inside the dark car.

The headlights stuck on high beam pretty much blinded them.

"I can't see anything so I don't think so," Joe said, then added. "I phoned the police and they should be here soon. Let me go get a flashlight though." He walked back into the house and searched the hall closet for one.

Although I stayed motionless up on the roof, I’ve heard Joe tell this story to his friends over and over again so I know what happened next.

Remember, it was the middle of the night and Joe wasn't totally awake. After searching around in the hallway closet, he found the flashlight he was looking for, tested it — the batteries worked — then turned suddenly and smacked his head right into the sharp edge of the closet door.

"Ouch," he cried and uttered angrily one or two of the seven words I was told never to put in my column.

He got to about the middle of the sidewalk and I saw him reach up and rub his forehead.

"Oh Christ," he said. "It's blood."

He shined the light inside the car and announced to the girls that the man had been by himself.

The neighbors stood around for a moment but they got cold and were perhaps embarrassed to listen to this song while standing beside a neighbor they really didn't know very well. Anyway, they said goodnight and went back home.

The music was incessant but Joe wasn't about to climb into the crime scene and attempt to turn that brutal noise off. So he stood there staring at the wrecked car. It was a late-model Camaro — bright red and still sending out clouds of steam.

With all this commotion, I forgot about the rat, mostly. In my experience rodents piddle then take off as soon as there is any sign of humans approaching. Still, there are few things as tasty as a warm rat liver – which as you might expect is lost on humans.

Joe rubbed his forehead again and noticed how sticky it was, but he stood looking at the wrecked car mesmerized by its obnoxious intrusion into the once quiet night.

With events as traumatic and unexpected as this, it's important to take a time-out, sit quietly and review the facts.

It's 2:30 in the morning.

There's no one around but Joe.

An upside down Camaro is sitting in front of Joe's house with its lights and music still on.

The police are on their way.

And Joe's bleeding.

About five minutes later, a police car pulled up (Code 2) and noticed Joe.

"We’re going to block off the street," he told Joe from the patrol car. He spoke in that wide-awake tone common to people who regularly work a night shift. Two more squad cars showed up. The latter two positioned themselves with their lights spinning at either end of the block and diverted any further traffic.

Joe stood on the sidewalk watching the policemen do their stuff. Because the driver's side of the Camaro was resting against the parked cars it had side swiped, no one could get to the controls to turn off the lights and music. So everyone had to endure the ordeal.

"Looks like he got too close to one of those parked cars and then overcompensated and that flipped him," the officer said matter-of-factly as he walked over to Joe and thankfully didn't flash a light in my owner's face.

"I’ve called for a flat bed," the cop said. "Did you see what he looked like?"

Joe described a guy in his 20s or 30s, medium build, wearing black.

As they chatted and waited around, the Camaro's battery started to die and the officer told Joe that he should go back inside.

When I saw Joe heading in, I thought that it was time for me to go in as well. By the time Joe got into the living room, I was at the back door and he let me in.

I could tell Joe was wide awake now. I watched him wash the blood off his face and then turn the TV on — shark week!

So we sat together on the bed for about a half hour.

Then we both jumped up as someone knocked on the door.

Joe went to open it and I went under the kitchen table.

It was the police officer who first came to the scene.

"I saw your lights on and I thought I’d give you an update," he said. "Our call center just heard from someone who appeared to be very out of breath. The guy said, ‘Somebody … ahh huh ahh huh ahh huh … just stole my car.’" He laughed.

"We think it's rather suspicious because usually when someone steals a car they drive away from the place where they stole the car rather than head right back to where they took the car from," he said.

They both laughed and the officer said, "The wrecker's on its way and we’ll clean up the street after we get it flipped back over and loaded up."

"Thanks," said Joe and they said "Goodnight."

We went back to the bedroom and the sharks were biting people right through the steel cages. It was a repeat of a program we’d seen before. Joe peeked through the window and watched as the tow company flipped the car over using a winch. They pulled it up on the flatbed, secured it, got out some brooms and cleaned up all the broken glass. The workers waved goodbye to the police and everyone left.

The street was quiet again.

The next day Joe and I went outside to get the newspaper and examine the smashed parked cars. Joe looked in the gutter and found a baseball. It must have rolled out of the upside down Camaro.

When the neighbors who owned the cars that got hit came out to talk to Joe, they said they had slept through the entire episode, but I don't see how. Now their two cars had smashed sides. They just shrugged their shoulders and Joe handed them the baseball and said he was sorry.

We walked slowly back to the house and I noticed Joe looking at the front garden and groaning.

Here's what he did next ... to be continued

You may remember Joe groaning about the front flower bed at the end of last week's column. This spot has been a challenge for him since he bought the house 23 years ago as it gets no sunlight and the choices of shade-loving plants are limited. He has placed in that dirt several different botanical specimens over the years.

Impatiens was the first. They’re easy to grow, spread quickly, show an attractive color swatch, but need to be watered and weeded regularly throughout the season. They are quickly killed by the first frost. Then came the ten rhododendrons. These were expensive and caused him to have high hopes for huge fuchsia-colored blossoms sitting on top of a tall evergreen forest of attractive leaves. For three years, however, they sat there barely hanging on, producing no new leaves and even fewer flowers. One by one, they died. He got fed up and yanked the remaining two or three out. Their roots had never bothered to test Salinas’ sweet but rather dense adobe soil. Remember, they once built houses out of this stuff.

Then came the "easy-to-care-for" ornamental grasses. He had selected several types, the common names for which were rainbow grass, fountain grass, feather reedgrass, Japanese forest grass and one or two others. They looked great for two years but eventually got so long and thick they invaded each other and started flopping all over the place. They even spread under the sidewalk and populated areas where they weren't welcome. One of those varieties even had viable seeds so the lawn was never the same again. Most withered with the first cold snap and turned the front garden into Baghdad after a bombing. They truly needed to be cut back.

So Joe got out his trash can, sharpened his shears and pulled on his gloves. He started at the side walk end, grabbed a bunch of the 3- to 4-foot-tall grass with the feather-like seed pods on the end, and vigorously started snipping at the base. He only had to do this for about 3 minutes when he noticed agitation in the mound before him. Something was stirring inside the thick grass.

Then, a slow moving white paw emerged from the stems and suddenly swatted his glove. It disappeared back into the mound of long leaves. Joe smiled and continued his pruning.

The next bunch of grass he grabbed had the most thrilling and fully formed plumes one could pray for. Again, that mysterious white paw came through the thick grass and swiped his gloved hand. He chuckled and continued slicing away at the clump and tossing the dead grass into the recycle container.

Joe was pulling together the next handful of coarse stems when the phantom paw once again intruded his space. Quickly, he dropped the shears and pinched it hard.

It was my foot!

I let out my best Ninja scream, "urrrr RAYANG gerrrr," flew three feet into the air, one paw extended and the other cocked back and ready to inflict serious damage on my opponent.

All Joe could do was laugh hysterically. I landed firmly on the mound, back hips held up high, head and front paws down low on the ground, growling and swaying side-to-side ready for my next death-inflicting attack.

Joe now was guffawing with tears in his eyes. He was holding his stomach and groaning with laughter. My prey distracted, I decided to pounce. So I leaped into the air and managed a four-paw landing on his arm — claws retracted, of course. Then, I darted away. I was glad I could so easily amuse this man.

I thought I better go hide again as here was Joe laying sprawled out on the ground in the front yard laughing uncontrollably. He was in full view of the neighborhood. Not that I cared much about people's opinion but I was in a certain manner worried for him. They take people away and lock them up for observation for less than this. It's called 5150 in police jargon. He might indeed be a danger to himself.

When he regained his composure, he looked about for me and I was sitting on a rock over in the sun. He teased me with a rather long specimen of feather-top grass and I couldn't resist. We played for about five minutes then I got tired of jumping up and down and demolishing the strands of grass and Joe sighed again and looked at the bed only a quarter of which had been cleaned out.

Then I got sad as Joe continued to hack down more grass. I couldn't pretend I was a Bengal tiger out there anymore but I understood that winter was coming and the garden needed to be tidied up before the rains started.

From this little event Joe became convinced that one could not claim to be a true garden enthusiast without having a cat by one's side. Plants grow better with a cat wandering around among them. It's a known fact.

I loved the front yard and enjoyed it being a sort of crossroads. I played at being a school guard watching and protecting the children who walk by going to class every morning. They were very regular and I like that — walked one way just before 8 a.m. and walked the other way sometime after 2 p.m. I usually missed the return journey as it conflicts with my sleep time.

For all of Joe's good nature in nature, I can't say that he laughed much when I tried a few ninja maneuvers in the house.

It was relatively soon after I started to spend more time indoors that I got my first true scolding.

Joe was cooking and doing dishes at the sink in the kitchen. I wanted to play and noticed that his Persian carpet under the dining room table had these long tassels — sort of like the feather top grass I loved. Well, I laid down on my side and grabbed a fist full of tassels in my front paws and used my back ones to rip at the ones down there.

"Hey," Joe shouted, "Cut that out."

I stopped, jumped up and walked to the kitchen door. Joe paid no attention. I sat still for a moment watching him chop vegetables but quickly got bored. I then turned my head. My eyes fell on the fringe and I had to dive for it. Once again, I was on my side, hooked on with my front and scratching as fast as I could with back legs.

"Dammit, I said stop that," Joe yelled but I paid no attention and continued. Suddenly, I was hit in the face with a wet dish rag which was quite a messy shock. So I ran behind the couch and hid. I watched Joe pick up the towel and toss it back in the sink.

I don't know. I just don't know. I suppose if there was a cat equivalent of thumb-sucking, bed-wetting, nail-biting in humans; there was a rug fringe annihilating in cats.

Yep. Joe's back in the kitchen. I’m behind the couch. I look out. I see tassels. Vavoom — I’m on ‘em and trying my best to rip ‘em to shreds.

"You little sh*t!" Joe said in his lowest and meanest voice. He ran over to me, grabbed me by my scruff, and slapped my head soundly. "What did I tell you?"

I wailed.

Miserable groans came from deep inside me and my whole body shook. He didn't actually hit me very hard but it was more how startled I was that I reached his limit. I also felt bad about not being able to control myself and that I had disappointed Joe. I stood in the middle of the living room and cried out loud.

This outburst took Joe quite by surprise and soon he was next to me, picking me up and sitting me on his lap. He started in about how sorry he was but I just kept crying.

Later, I overheard Joe tell his friends he was doing his best "not to laugh" because I was behaving so much like a two-year-old.

Well folks, you do the math!

While I was sitting on Joe's lap and he was soothing me he noticed my fur. Now that winter was coming and I would be in the house more, I might have to be a little cleaner. He decided he needed to know more about cats and baths.

So here's what he did next … to be continued.

I was sleeping in the sun on the patio, dreaming of a land of endless delights where tuna water ran in the streams, dishes were full of crunchy treats, and all the plants in the garden smelled of intrigue. I heard the patio door slide open and watched Joe approach through one half-opened eye. He got closer and I opened both eyes. He reached down and lifted me up, kissed the top of my head, and then looked at my feet and hind legs. OK, they were a little muddy.

Joe carried me into the house with his arms extended and my hind legs dangling. His voice continuously making soothing sounds. We turned the corner and entered the bathroom. The shower curtain was pulled to one side. A stack of towels rested on the vanity. A bottle of flea shampoo was on the bathtub rim. The tub was full of warm water. I knew what was coming and let out a low, sad groan.

Splash! Into the water I was plunged and immediately fought against this indignant and terrifying ordeal. But Joe's got big hands and they were not going to let go no matter how much of the bath water I was able to swish out of the tub and onto him. His hands are so large just one of them can hold me tightly while the other dumped this awful smelling shampoo on my neck and back.

"Oooo," he said, "You’re gonna smell so nice and clean."

That's no consolation, no comfort. I cried in that low and pathetic tone cats muster when escape is out of the question.

"We just can't have you bringing all that mud in the house. Can we?" he asked.

The shampoo and water did their trick and I was now covered in foamy wet fur. Joe massaged and scrubbed and rinsed and scrubbed some more and all the shampoo he dumped on me kept foaming and foaming up.

I wriggled and writhed and managed up stir up a bath tub tsunami which hit its target dead on.

Joe drained the tub as the bath water was now filthy, foamy and thick with hair. OK, I was shedding a bit but he would not let go of me however much I fought. He managed to turn the bathtub tap on and test it. Then, he used his free hand to cup the water and splash it up against me to rinse out the foam. This took too long. So he held on to me with two hands moved me right under the gushing spigot. I remember wriggling a lot but not much else.

He paused for a moment to notice how tiny my body actually is when I’m soaking wet.

"OK, Bud, we’re nearly done now."

He turned off the water tap and using his hand like a squeegee, he put me through the spin cycle.

Reaching behind him, he grabbed a fluffy towel and covered me with it.

In one quick motion, he lifted me and the towel up, grabbed the other towels and walked back out to the patio. One towel absorbed most of the water. The second one quickly twirled over me and the third sat on his legs.

Slowly Joe moved the towel up and down my back trying to dry my fur off. All four legs and paws got a good rubbing as did my head, neck, belly and backside. Throughout this procedure I was quiet and patient and even purred softly.

Joe replaced the second towel with a dry fourth one and vigorously rubbed me all over. That's when I started my low growl. When he was rough with my back legs which are sensitive, I hissed and spit in his face.

He put me down on the patio and picked up the wet towels. Joe was now wetter than I was. I sat in the sun for a few minutes rearranging my fur.

Joe appeared on the patio with a bowl of fish-flavored treats wearing an entirely new set of clothes.

Later in the day, he kept picking me up, hugging me, sticking his nose into my fur and breathing deep.

"You smell so delicious," he said. Little compensation for the torture I endured.

Weeks passed.

A co-worker of Joe's who had owned cats his entire life was sympathetic when Joe related to him how difficult my first bath was to carry off. This person must have been testing Joe's gullibility more than sharing practical advice.

This happened. It really did. In fact, it's a primary reason why I thought writing this column might be good — a sort of public service warning about what not to do.

Here goes.

The garden was wet after a lengthy early morning rain. I was outside and particularly bored. I wanted to play. A fat rat proved to be the right vehicle for my entertainment. Off I went on its trail. The hunt, however, brought me into direct contact with terra not-so-firma. It was pretty mucky out back. I admit so was I and I gave up.

Joe was finishing his first cup of coffee so it was early. He noticed me trying to wash myself on the patio and how muddy I was.

"C’mon Bud," Joe said, "Let's take a shower together." That was the "friend's" advice!

Joe picked me up, carried me into the bathroom and placed me on the sink countertop. I watched him take off his T-shirt and running shorts and hang them on the hook behind the door which he closed. He reached behind the curtain, turned on the water and adjusted the temperature. Then swung around and picked me up.

He was as cheerful as ever, "We’re going to have a nice warm shower."

I knew where this was going and saw shock and awe written all over it. I gave him no assurance I was going to go quietly. I growled and hissed. Still he pressed me against his warm chest, pulled the curtain back, and into the tub he stepped closing the curtain behind us.

"Here we go," he said and stepped forward into the shower spray.

The moment the first drop of water touched my ear, my claws went directly into Joe's flesh. He screamed. My back paws dug into Joe's belly and gave me enough of a ledge to jump up onto his head with my hind legs digging into his shoulders and my front ones buried deeply into his scalp. I completely obscured his face and he staggered about in the stream of water — my belly smack up against his cheeks.

Joe, poor guy, was not only startled by the suddenness of these events but was now also blind and in considerable pain.

He turned quickly to try and pull me off his head but unfortunately his knee hit the shower's "On" lever and turned the tap to cold.

I decided he was no longer stable — hmmmm! — and I wasn't going to go down with the ship. So I jumped for the rod holding up the shower curtain. It's only mounted there by a pressure coil. Once hit by a 10-pound soaking wet, very angry feline, it's coming down.

And down it went.

I road it like a surfer until it crashed into the toilet tank knocking a soap dish onto the floor and box of tissue into toilet. I leaped onto the sink counter but slid across it and toppled over the toothbrush holder sending the toothbrushes and toothpaste onto the now soaking wet rug. Then, I jumped down to the floor and hid in the corner by the door.

Joe stood naked in the tub shivering and bleeding. He turned the water off and looked down at the scratches and muddy paw prints on his chest, arms and shoulders. He touched his sore scalp. It was bleeding and throbbing.

The entire bathroom looked like Katrina had blown through. A soaking wet shower curtain covered half the mess. Even the towels which he had so carefully stacked to dry me off were sodden with the spray from the shower head.

Joe looked at the clock. It was 12 to 8. He sighed deeply, bent over and lifted up the shower curtain and rod. He adjusted the pressure coil inside the rod and rehung the curtain. Turned the water back on and took a long and steamy shower. When he finished, he found a partially dry towel, put his clothes back on and started putting things in order.

He lifted me up, wiped the mud off my paws with a wet towel and dried me with a little hand towel that was saved from the downpour. He opened the door and I ran out to the patio again. The sun was now up and I found a warm place to finish drying off.

He was very distant for the rest of the day and kept the doors shut.

Around suppertime, he opened the sliding door and offered me some kibbles — Fancy Feast's Filet Mignon and Shrimp flavor — the best.

And here's what he did next ... to be continued

The best thing Joe did, and this holds true to this very day, is stop taking advice from other cat owners.

I loved being outside and, when it was truly miserable weather, I joined Joe inside. If he wasn't around and I was inside, I just slept the day away and made certain I didn't disrupt anything.

Any project Joe might get involved in, I was right there offering interest, encouragement and occasionally sympathy — he wasted a lot of time on projects that didn't quite work out. Take for example the organizer for nuts, bolts, nails and screws that he made out of empty baby food jars. He thought I might enjoy "baby's first meal." But I immediately tried to bury that crap and he gave up on trying to feed it to me. The organizer worked for awhile but the threads on the lids got too loose and with the weight of the contents fell down on their own. They scared me to death when they dropped and made Joe think I was somehow responsible.

One day, we were pulling weeds from under a rose bush when one fell down of its own accord and proved my innocence.

My favorite of Joe's creations were the ditches he dug around his rose beds in the back yard. He told folks that he made them to add vertical interest to the garden beds. But, truthfully, he created these trenches to facilitate drainage. When he moved into his house, his back yard was much lower than his front. It was even lower than his neighbors’ yards which adjoined it. Every time one of those wet storms came down from Alaska, the backyard flooded. The clay soil turned to muck and stayed wet and soggy for days. So over the years, Joe hauled in mulch and top dressing, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow, to cover the garden beds — and elevate them. The ditches, too, had to be maintained to make certain they were deep enough for the water to flow out, around the side of the house, into the front yard and down into the street.

During most of the dry year, however, these little arroyos were a perfect place for me to hide. The birds at the feeder in the middle of the lawn were never expecting an attack from the ditch.

Joe learned how to find me by scanning the edge of the green lawn looking for one white ear and one black ear sticking up.

I’d mentioned Old Wes before. He was the fellow who lives next door to Joe. He, too, lives by himself but unlike Joe, he is home all day long. Best thing about Wes and his yard is the absence of dogs and other cats. There was just me, and then only as an afternoon visitor. Wes didn't mind me stopping by to see him as he sat on his patio reading the newspaper. As soon as someone came to visit him, though, I took off. I wasn't interested in knowing any more human beings.

It was Wes who told Joe about my unusual bird hunting technique. I’d sit up on the roof and wait for the spitzies to fly between the houses. Sparrows and finches always look down when they fly, searching for food or a decent place to land. So I’d time my leap from the eaves just perfectly and hit them from above, hold onto them with my jaws and land on all fours in front of Wes. That impressed him.

Of course, I don't recommend this to your cats as many of those six- and seven-foot landings have eaten up eight of my nine lives. Ouch!

My hind legs are close to useless these days. I’m so stiff I can't even twist around to groom myself. I still moan and groan during the baths which are much more frequent now because they have to be, but Joe is also much better at giving them. He uses off-brand baby shampoo which is easier to rinse off in the tub and still makes me smell fresh. He no longer wastes $48 on 8 ounces of specialized feline dandruff reduction shampoo.

Money means something to Joe. I’ve always felt its only value was to make life more comfortable right here, right now. Humans place importance on things of value.

One night, Joe was watching another of his nature programs on TV. This one was particularly riveting for him as it was all about cats! He learned about our relatively late domestication. Dogs, horses, and cows have us cats beat by several millennia. He saw film clips of our closest relatives —Asian wild cats — and our recent explosion of popularity, overtaking our rivals in the pet world. You know who.

Joe listened carefully as the program's narrator, in dark and deep tones, recited a list of breeds with representational photos.

"Through the course of the domestication of the house cat," the narrator noted, "man has used his breeding talent to create and accentuate certain feline characteristics. This has resulted in the creation of several distinct breeds whose characteristics fit a predetermined standard. Most popular are the Siamese, the Persian, the Abyssinian. There's also the Russian blue, Maine coon, Cornish Rex, and … Japanese bobtail."

Joe's jaw dropped.

"Japanese bobtail!" He’d never heard of that breed before, had never seen a picture of this ancient type of Oriental house cat. The show ended.

Immediately, Joe turned off the TV and fired up his computer. He did a quick search of Japanese bobtail on the internet and pulled up a photo gallery featuring pictures of them. He was stunned as he looked through the photos.

"Buddy," was all he uttered.

He ran to the back bedroom where I had fallen sound asleep — well, with Joe around, I wouldn't call any of my sleep truly sound. At any rate, he lifted me up, carried me over to the computer and set me on the desktop.

He looked at the screen and read, "Eyes more oval than round."

Looked me in the face, "Yep," he said.

Returned to the screen, "Ears wide apart and standing straight at 45 degrees to the face,"

"That too," he said.

"Back legs a little longer than front ones."

He pulled me around and tugged on my legs, "Got it," he said.

"Predominantly white with black or calico spots, but could be any color."

"Definitely," he nodded.

"Very vocal."

"Bud can't keep his mouth shut," he whispered.

"The bobtail usually has anything from a stub to a short tail with a kink."

He felt mine.

"Stub," he said.

That was enough pokin’ ‘n’ proddin’ for me. I struggled and Joe let me jump down. I headed outside and he kept on reading.

"Brought to this country from Japan in 1968. Quickly became popular. Ancient breed of street cat in Japan. The calico, called ‘mi-ke,’ is most prized. The breed features in a legend that runs more or less like this. It was said that once a man was eating at a restaurant and spotted a Japanese bobtail outside. The cat stared at him intensely and raised its front paw. The man got up to see the cat and scratch its head. Just as he touched the cat, the heavy wooden beam above the chair where he was sitting gave way and came crashing down."

Thank you Mr. Cat.

The Japanese bobtail is that friendly ceramic, paw-raised cat that sits on check-out counters at Chinese and Japanese restaurants. It's a symbol of good luck. Sometimes with a clock in its belly, sometimes with a mechanical paw that waves hello. It was also the inspiration for the ‘Hello Kitty’ image.

Joe poked around on the internet and found a breeder with an 831 telephone number. That dealer listed Japanese bobtail kittens on her website at $600 a piece!

When next he saw me, Joe lifted me up, stared into my face and said, "You’re worth $600, Buddy boy!"

His entire demeanor toward me changed. He next showed up with a new stiff metal brush, a soft nylon brush, a flea comb, and several more catnip stuffed mice toys.

At work, Joe told everyone including people who hate cats that his cat was a "Japanese bobtail."

From this time forward, he rarely referred to me as a cat. When asked by some new acquaintance if he owned a pet, Joe would say, "Yes, I have a Japanese bobtail." If they looked bewildered — unsure exactly what type of animal that might be, he added, "That's an ancient breed of cat."

If given any encouragement, he’d also add, "He's worth at least $600."

Now that my monetary value had been established, Joe didn't feel so bad about spending the $48 on that ritzy cat dandruff shampoo.

"Just taking care of the investment," he bragged.

"Investment!" I thought. This fellow does not remember history.

And here's what he did next ... to be continued

During the first dozen years Joe lived in his house in Salinas, he thought about remodeling his kitchen. His approach was methodical. He sought advice from many friends and knowledgeable people. He jotted down a list of "must-haves" and looked at several home improvement magazines — when I wasn't sound asleep on top of them. He knew exactly what he hated and would never have in his house, but he wavered a lot on what should happen and when. He knew what shabby things he had to improve but wasn't certain about the materials or appliances to put into the newly designed kitchen. This would have been 2004 and the offers of home equity loans seemed endless and cheap.

One of the first consultants to come to our house was Mr. Wayne Dilbeck of Dilbeck & Sons Construction in Salinas. Mr. Dilbeck's headquarters were located near the storage unit of Joe's former employer, just off West Rossi Street. So he decided to get in touch with them and was happy when Mr. Dilbeck himself arranged a visit. Joe was thrilled to have such a knowledgeable and experienced man help him.

It was probably on a Saturday — that's a tiring day as most of the neighborhood cats are out late the night before, especially when there's a full moon. I’m always confused at home because that's the day when everything is off schedule. Joe's always running about the house and yard doing things, coming and going in his truck, and running the washing machine which is loud and scares me. People occasionally drop by unannounced — at least to me.

At any rate, Joe's truck was in the driveway. A much larger truck with a rack over the bed was in front of the house. The garage door was wide open. I’d been out most of the night snooping around the neighborhood picking fights with a couple of ferals who claimed they didn't know my yard was private property and it took me longer to finish smelling the neighbors' tires. I was exhausted and decided on a short cut.

I heard talk coming from the kitchen and walked into the garage. When I finished checking out that space under the cupboards for rats and mice, I was ready to go indoors.

Joe was chatting with Wayne Dilbeck. The windowless door from the kitchen to the garage was closed shut. I just didn't have the energy to walk around, climb a fence and deposit myself onto a patio chair.

"I’d like to put in a garden window," I heard Joe say.

"That's a standard size space and we can make it fit," the other voice (Wayne's) replied.

"When I make coffee and toast at the same time, I blow a fuse," Joe said.

"Yea, all of the electricity has to be redone to bring it up to code," Wayne answered.

"Errrr raing," I interjected from my side of the door.

They paused.

Joe continued, "I’d like to put in a disposal."

"That's easy," Wayne said, "but we’ll have to take a look at the plumbing. Houses in this neighborhood were built with all the pipes in the concrete slab and that's not …."

"Errrr RAING," I said firmly, thinking maybe they hadn't heard me.

Joe paid no attention to me and continued talking, "Now, one of the things I want most is a light above the sink. I hate doing dishes in the shadows."

"ER RAING guh," I snapped.

"All the electrical will have to be redone, so you can have …" Wayne started and stopped.

"RAING RAING RAING," I shouted.

"Now let's talk about counter tops," Joe said clearly ignoring me, "should I choose granite or something else?"

Exasperated, I screamed, "ERRRR RAING GUUUUH."

"Joe," Wayne said softly, "I think your cat wants in."

Reluctantly, and a bit embarrassed about my behavior, Joe opened the kitchen door. I slowly stepped inside, looked straight ahead, paid no attention to either men, walked between them, turned the corner and headed out on the patio. I could feel two sets of eyes following me.

Their conversation lasted another 15 minutes or so and then Wayne said goodbye, got in his truck and drove away.

Joe locked the house and drove away, too.

A few hours later, Joe returned with a package under his arm. It was something called a "Kitty Entrance" and it was supposed to fit snugly next to a sliding door.

What began next was Joe's effort to train me to use a pet door. I understood the concept and walked freely in and out through it — as long as Joe held the flap open for me and there was a treat on the other side.

As soon as he started pushing my head against that swinging door, my legs flew out straight in front of me, locked into position against the frame, and would not budge. I did not see why I had to push my head against a piece of plastic. Joe was always available to me for that purpose. The game I invented became let's see how long I can wait before I put my stiff legs out.

Various incentives — feathered toys, tuna water, treats: hard and soft — were placed before me which I sincerely enjoyed — as long as Joe held that little door open.

Joe tried again a bit later that day and a couple of times more the following day. He was deflated because he thought he could train me to do anything. What I knew that Joe hadn't quite figured out yet was that he himself likes to come and go freely through this door. The insert fell down every time he swung the glass sliding door open.

It, the cat door, was soon relegated to a shelf in the garage where I remember sitting on top of it a few times. I don't know what ever happened to it though in the end.

Anyway, months passed before the remodeling began. I heard Joe say that Mr. Dilbeck was getting so much business he had a hard time fitting us in anytime soon. But, I won't forget his teaching Joe that immediate cat needs take precedent over dreams of new kitchens.

The folks from Salinas Valley Appliances which, alas, is no more, showed up, worked with Joe, drew up plans and began destroying the old kitchen.

In the midst of all these disruptions, Joe had moved the large living room furniture against a far wall, hauled the dining room table and chairs into the back bedroom, rolled up the carpeting and covered everything in bed sheets. It was so much fun to play in that open space and to be able to sit on the top shelf of the bookcase, I just can't tell you.

It was during this time. I think it was a Saturday morning again because Joe was home and saw for himself what happened. The kitchen was nearly finished and they were getting ready to repaint the living and dining room. I just happened to be looking out of the picture window into the front yard, when out from the bushes guess who I saw staring back at me?

My old man!

I’d thought I’d smelled his stink a few days earlier but couldn't be certain. It had been three years since I left that old lair of his. Now here he was as ugly and pompous as ever. And on the prowl

Know what he did? He hissed and spit at me. What a greeting!

Know what I did back? From my side of the window? I snarled and roared as powerfully as I could muster. I had the benefit of the empty room and its echo chamber. What a volume I mustered! It caused his eyes to pop out and he trembled. Ha!

"Look on my might works ye mighty and despair," I quoted.

Joe came flying into the room amid my growling and roaring to see what was up and saw my tail-less, yellow, mangy papa take off running across the front lawn and down the street, never to be seen again.

Here's what Joe did next ... to be continued

Surprised at seeing a tailless yellow cat at his front picture window and hearing me growling like the king of beasts, Joe stepped out of the front door and I followed closely behind. My old man was heading west on Chaparral Street and we watched him race down the sidewalk. He disappeared in some bushes on the corner of Maryal Drive. I raced over to the liquid amber tree near the curb, sharpened my claws energetically on its trunk and sprinted back into the house passing in front of Joe and winning the gold medal.

My pop's surprise visit coincided with one of Joe's exercise periods. I’ve lived through six of these heart healthy episodes, which usually occurred just before and just after Joe visits his doctor. Joe seemed proud of keeping his numbers down — during those periods.

That evening, Joe put on some walking shoes and a sweatshirt, locked the house, and headed west. He was thinking again of my old man and wondering where that mean cuss might be holed up these days. I was of no help because I’ve got my own territory to supervise and haven't strayed very far from the rose garden.

North Main Street is too noisy for a contemplative walk so Joe turned onto Noice and headed toward Laurel Drive. Somewhere along this stretch of his exercise route his eyes fell on a gray cat sitting on the top step of one of the houses.

Joe stopped dead in his tracks and stared. The cat looked so much like me. Joe waited. It got up and walked across the front porch. NO TAIL! This cat was predominantly an ash color but had some black and white markings, the same length of fur, the same shape of head and body, and (I’m bragging, please indulge me) the same intelligent eyes. It even returned his stare with a short little "meow," just like I do all the time.

No scaredy cats in my family! I’m convinced the cat was my long lost sister. I was thrilled to hear Joe tell his friends about her. He also saw the dirty abandoned garage I once called home. (My handmade quilts are much more comfortable than that greasy ol’ torn towel that was our communal bed and Joe's hand thrown pottery dishes are certainly steps above the garbage can lid that was our joint trough — even though one or two of Joe's bowls are a bit lop sided.)

In subsequent walks, Joe noticed a few other cats wandering in and out of that garage but he never saw my sister again. Each time he peeped about that old lady's property he saw cats he’d never seen before.

That was years ago now and the last time Joe walked by that house, maybe last Christmas, the curtains were all pulled shut and the garage door was closed tight. The broken patio furniture was gone. No sign of any cats.

Let's go back to the remodeled kitchen.

A few days after we chased my dad out of the yard, it was time to put the house back in order. I stayed outside mostly because of the smell of the new paint. But when Joe started moving the furniture back into position I felt I owed him the courtesy of my helping paws and chased the edges of the sheets that covered the chairs and sofa.

During this major reshuffling, Joe went to the garage and returned with an old-fashioned straw broom. At seeing it, I panicked and ran toward the door to the patio, but when I got there it was closed. I reversed engines and darted behind the couch trying my best to crawl under it.

Joe stood there with his mouth open and was totally confused. There had never been any episode that involved him, me, and a broom. What could have caused such a panic attack in Buddy, he wondered. He slowly walked over to the sliding door with the broom still in his hand, opened it and moved aside. I recoiled a bit and then darted right through the opening and was soon out on the back lawn and over the fence. Free at last!

The churning in Joe's head continued for the remainder of that day. He was sweeping up the lint, dust, and assorted rose leaves and petals that had blown into the house; wiping off the mantle, bookcase shelves and end tables with a damp cloth; and rehanging the lithographs on his walls.

Suddenly, he stopped. His synapses connected and threw him back a couple of years to a comment made by his first cleaning lady — now long since gone. It was a forgotten memory. She was two departed housekeepers back. Her comment finally had significance.

It went like this, "Kitty-cat no good in house. Kitty-cat go outside. Kitty-cat STAY outside."

Oh, this particular cleaning lady never hurt me with the broom, but she certainly threatened me with it on several occasions, especially that one time when I came in from the garden and my paws were a bit "dusty." All I did was walk across a wet kitchen floor checking to see if she had mopped up all of the evil smells. She hadn't quite done that but my inspection was interrupted by the broom smacking me in the rear.

Joe smiled. To this day, I’ve hated the sight of a broom. The vacuum cleaner is another matter. It's just way too loud. I exit to the garden and wait until it's quiet again. So I have issues with a few things but they’re minor to my other abilities.

While we’re on the topic of me, I should also mention another of what Joe describes as my awesome talents. My hearing! I think I’ve mentioned before I can hear a rat scratching from 50 feet away and I can.

It totally freaks Joe out though when we’re sitting quietly and he's watching TV and I’m taking a nap and I suddenly do this. I’ll bolt upright, tilt my head and stare toward the front door. Joe notices me, and then the doorbell rings. Meanwhile, Joe hasn't heard a footstep.

This has happened several times and Joe continues to be amazed. The postman drops letters in the mailbox, high school band members are selling candy bars, strangers want to talk about home security systems, or evangelicals are inviting him to their congregation. Through it all, I’m right there giving him a signal, someone's coming!

Given my extraordinary hearing, Joe finds the reverse side of it aggravating.

He’ll say "Get out of the way!" to me and I’ll continue to stay in the middle of his path. He’ll say "Buddy, come here quick" and I’ll maybe stare at him, maybe not. He’ll say "OK Bud, it's time for you to go outside," and I’ll sigh and close my eyes.

If this article is about true confessions, I did miss my "someone's coming" cue just one time, but it was in the middle of the night and, well very serious ...

This is what happened … to be continued

Joe had been busy straightening up the house for the entire day. Company was coming. He had invited several people from his office to come over for Halloween which was the following evening.

The caveat to attending one of Joe's Halloween parties was this. He would provide dinner and drinks but guests were required to bring all the candy for the hundreds of trick-or-treaters who were inevitably coming to the door. Guests would then help to pass out the candy. No costumes for the guests were required which seemed to delight all of them.

I’ve written about my first costume which was a cowboy. My second costume — and I’m not making this up — was a "show girl." I’d warned you all about that bejeweled collar reappearing around my neck. This costume he created had a circle of colorful feathers mounted on it and I was supposed to prance Las Vegas-style around the room with my head framed by all these long feathers. Fortunately, gravity was on my side so the weight of the top feathers kept circling around my neck and ending up at my feet making it tricky to walk at all. It wasn't successful. Joe tried to fix it once or twice and then just gave up and took it off me. There is a God.

After I greeted everyone and allowed folks to "ooo" and "ah" over my extraordinary handsomeness and generally gregarious nature, I retired to the bedroom for the remainder of the night. The guests by this time were busy coming and going as were the hundreds of children and their parents who came to the door.

Many kids picked Chaparral Street to walk down because it was flat, non-stop houses from Natividad Road to North Main Street, and most importantly, Sandra, my neighbor about seven houses away, and her family carved 50 or so gigantic pumpkins and invited everyone to walk about them on the front lawn and enjoy the great carving job and the candles. It was a wonderful and generous gesture on their part. They worked in the produce business and had access to these giant pumpkins. Some were three or four feet tall! It was such a special treat for many and I enjoyed hearing about them but there was never time for me to see them for myself. Sandra's husband became sick one year and the jack-o-lantern period ended.

Joe's guests loved to come over to see the pumpkins, to enjoy the children's costumes and to get together over good food and wine.

But I’m getting way ahead of myself.

Joe was cleaning all day and preparing food that could stay in the refrigerator and be ready to serve the next day. He was exhausted and frankly so was I. Watching Joe go here and there, in the garage, in the back bedroom, outside on the patio, back in the kitchen, was more tiring than you might think. He was always in a hurry making sure that when the guests arrived everything would be ready for them. A cheese board was made up, bowls of nuts were here and there, the table had its leaves put in and was pushed against a wall. Plates, glasses, napkins, utensils all were ready ahead of time so he could spend most of the next day just cooking.

So when ten or eleven came around, it was "lights out ladies and gentlemen. Time to rest." It was also a moonless night so I had no interest in wandering the neighborhood looking for troublemakers. We both got onto the bed and fell soundly asleep.

At around 2 a.m., we heard a rap-rap-rap-rap on the front door. Joe and I jumped up and looked at each other. The knocking continued.

Joe went to the peep hole in the front door and looked out. He’d left the porch light on, fortunately, and could see clearly. He spotted a badge on the arm of one of the people standing there. It read "Salinas Police Department."

Joe and I immediately sensed something bad had happened. I took off and hid under the dining room table so I could disappear from the eyes of any intruders yet still watch what was going on. Joe opened the door.

Immediately the visitors began to speak.

"We got a call from your wife or girlfriend that you’d had too much to drink and she was afraid you were going to beat her up," said the uniformed police officer in one long emotionless breath. Standing next to him, was a female officer, also uniformed, and a plain-clothes detective.

Joe paused for what seemed a very long moment while he stared at the law enforcement trio standing on the porch and tried to assess the situation..

"Excuse me," Joe finally mumbled still partly snoozing.

"We got a call saying you were drinking too much and your wife was afraid of you," the uniformed officer said again.

"350 Chaparral Street?" Joe questioned incredulously.

"Yes, that's what she said," he replied.

"Are sure it wasn't 350 Chardonnay Street?" Joe asked because he frequently gets mail for that address in his box.

"No sir," the officer said, "She clearly stated ‘Chaparral.’"

"Maybe she meant ‘315?’" Joe answered trying to figure out the confusion.

The three members of Salinas’ finest remained at the front door unwilling to give up.

"Oh, for goodness sake," Joe said pleasantly, "C’mon in." He reached up and turned the lights on in the living room. Then, walked over to the hallway to the bedrooms and turned those lights on. He then joined the group in the center of the living room floor. Reaching over to the sliding door he opened that as well.

In the light of the living room, the three police officers looked a bit embarrassed.

"You live here alone?" the plainclothes man asked.

"Uh, yes, I do," Joe said, now fully awake and obviously not drunk, not ready to beat anybody up.

The three stood there for a moment, apparently unsure as to what to do next.

The uniformed officer, who had done the questioning, took out his flashlight and was shining it out into the black back yard.

"You got a pretty nice garden out there," he said in that alert tone most night shift workers have.

"You’re all welcome to come back and take a better look … in the daytime," Joe answered cheerfully.

The three looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders and said "Goodnight."

If they said they were sorry for bothering us in the middle of the night, I didn't hear it. In fact, I was furious that Joe said "Yes" to living alone question. Who the hell was I?

Perhaps Joe felt that the Salinas Police Department would not have considered me important enough to mention, perhaps he was too sleepy and didn't think of it, perhaps he thought if he did say "Just me and my cat" they might have thought he was making fun of their mistake. At any rate, I was smarting from the insult.

After such an interruption, Joe and I had a hard time going back to sleep. We kept wondering whether or not there was some drunk, somewhere in town, being abusive to his partner. I was particularly disturbed because if someone is that mean to their wife how the hell would he be toward his pets? I prayed he didn't have any.

Weeks went by before Joe realized that someone had played a not very funny practical joke. He suspected a clownish co-worker who wasn't able to attend the party. Cell phones were still very new and there were ways you could pull off a prank call like that without the call being traced.

Here's what Joe did next ... to be continued

Most evenings, I fall asleep in the house and then, sometime during the middle of the night, I’m ready to go outside again. This involves Joe having to get up, open the sliding door and let me out. I have several techniques of getting him to do this which are all variations on raising the dead. I’ll share them so readers who own cats can compare notes.

Number one: I stand at the bedroom door and cry with ever-increasing volume. In music that's called a crescendo and it's important to start off very softly so you’re not totally exhausted before you get to full volume. I’m very good at it. So good, that that's often all it takes to stir him from his slumber. It's my usual choice when the bedroom door is shut.

Number two: If the litter box is in hearing range of the bedroom, I bang on its sides with my paws while over-burying my deposit. It's much louder than you might think in the still of the night.

Number three: I’m not a particularly playful cat so knocking things off shelves or dragging toys with bells attached to them around the house aren't part of my usual repertoire but I have had to resort to them on occasion.

Number four: Sharpening my claws on the Persian rugs is a last resort but one I use if it's taking Joe more time than it should to get himself out of bed and I’ve tried and abandoned all other methods. It hurries him along and he's pleased to put me out of his sight quickly.

The bedroom door being open gives me many more options. I can "walk the ridge" by jumping up on the bed and doing a high wire act along the length of his body, carefully placing one paw in front of the other and slowly traversing his recumbent figure from toe to head. That usually gets him up, but it does take time and effort on my part and is a rather slow waking.

I can also jump on the bed, find Joe's face and carefully bring my nose as close to his cheek as possible without touching it. My long whiskers end up tickling his ear which always seems to get the desired result.

Another way to extract him from dreamland is both fun and effective. While Joe is in a deep sleep called REM sleep, I get his attention by watching his eyeballs dance around underneath his closed eyelids and then slowly touching them with one of my paws. His eyeballs do bounce around a lot when he's sound asleep and they kinda tickle the pads of my feet. I have to be careful though that he doesn't swat me like a mosquito or jump back violently and say mean things to me.

There's also my purring method which is the gentlest way of getting him up, but it takes much more time than any of the others. I position myself close to his ears and purr as loudly as possible. Once he opens his eyes, I give him my friendliest greeting, "You up? Are now. Let's eat."

My most ingenious way of waking Joe up only works if he's sleeping with his arm outside of the covers. I slowly move my paw along his upper arm, reach inside the sleeve of his T-shirt, touch his arm pit and slowly extend my claws. Like I said, I only use this when I’m in desperate need of going outside because as soon as Joe suddenly pulls away, he screams loudly and unfortunately, my claws scratch deeply into his soft flesh. That's the down side of the technique, but he is definitely awake and I get immediately tossed outside which is where I wanted to be in the first place.

Joe usually goes back to bed for another hour or so after most of these encounters. Once he finally does wake up for the day, I’m usually at the sliding door waiting for him to open it. It's time for his coffee — which always gets made first — and then he focuses on my breakfast.

Joe's observed three of my typical greetings when being let in each morning. I’d say 45 percent of the time I say nothing and just walk in, 45 percent of the time I give him a soft, short good morning "Meow." The remaining ten percent response provides him with a loud and oh-so-happy "Meeeeeeooooowwwww." This response is usually based on a successful bird whacking, a feral cat eviction from the premises, or just really high spirits, an empty stomach and my wanting to make Joe laugh in the morning. He never knows which response will greet him each day and has given up wondering.

I know Joe's weekly schedule by heart and the following routines are part of it.

I’m consistently there in the morning like I mentioned and then there again greeting him when he's home for work. It doesn't necessarily mean I’m just hungry because I’m what's called a "free feeder" and there's always food available in the dish. It's also that we enjoy each other's company and like to hang about together. I’ll sit at the doorway to the kitchen and watch him make supper. I’ll join him outside on the patio if he wants to look around the garden. I’ll sit on the bed with him, not for cuddles but for company. I’m not one of those cats that's constantly in your face, nor am I one that is persistently under the bed.

Early in our living together, I made a big mistake. I only did this once and I learned my lesson. Here's how Joe saw the incident.

He came home one night, drove up the driveway, pulled into the garage, gathered up his things, got out of the car, went to the kitchen door, pressed the button to close the garage door and walked into the house shutting the door behind him.

Joe then went to the sliding door and opened it, "Buddy, Buddy" he called, but I was not in the backyard. He walked through the house to the front door, opened it, got his mail, stepped out front and looked about the yard.

"Buddy, Buddy," he said then walked further out into the yard and looked at our neighbors’ yards. He even looked across the street which as I’ve mentioned before is verboten territory for me. But I was not there.

He figured I’d show up eventually which has happened several times in the past when I was preoccupied a couple of doors down. Joe made supper, poured himself a glass of wine, took it out to the patio and enjoyed his meal outside. Still no Buddy.

He carried the dishes into the kitchen, set them on the counter quickly, and went to his room. He watched television for a couple of hours and then got ready for bed. Just before bidding this day adieu, he slid the door open and went out onto the patio.

"Buddy, Buddy," he called. My absence was unusual but not unheard of. He did the same thing in the front yard again and was concerned but not overly so.

It had been a long day and Joe fell sound asleep. In the middle of the night though, he got up and decided to look for me again. No Buddy in the back and no Buddy in the front.

So he went back to bed, feeling confident that I’d surely be there when he got up the next day.

Joe woke up, pulled himself from the bed and headed toward the kitchen to make coffee. But stopped suddenly and decided to check the patio. I was not at the back door which he opened and looked about. He then left that door open walked through the living room and opened the front door. He fetched The Californian from the driveway and looked about for me but stopped calling my name.

Then, finally as he was banging around in the kitchen, he heard my voice. He looked out the kitchen window but couldn't see me. So he ran around to the side of the house but I wasn't there. While he was out there he even looked up on the roof. Still no Buddy.

He swore he’d heard my voice.

He went back to the kitchen and while he poured himself some coffee and fixed some toast. He heard me again and figured out where I was. He opened the garage door and voilà.

I gave him a head butt on his leg then raced over to my food bowl. I wasn't accustomed to waiting so long between meals.

The rose bush next to the garage door is one of my favorite spots to hide. I sit behind it and patrol Chaparral Street. That's where I was hiding when Joe came home. Once he turned the car off, I just headed inside the garage. Then the garage door closed. Then the kitchen door closed. Then I was a prisoner in my own home.

Like I said, that wasn't the last time I disappeared for a spell but that was the only time I would ever be trapped in the garage over night.

Joe has disappeared in the past. It's very troublesome, but that's another story ... to be continued

I’d mentioned that Joe disappeared on me one summer day several years ago. OK, he didn't really disappear. He just drove off and then didn't come home for days.

Before this happened he was climbing up in the attic and took down these two large black box-like things he referred to as suitcases. I thought they were particularly fun to sit in when they were empty and out in the middle of the living room floor. He put a few things inside them like clothes and what looked like gifts and then mostly ignored them.

Then, in the middle of the night, he woke up and started doing what he normally does after the sun comes up: made coffee and toast, gave me some Grilled Tuna with Gravy, and went in the bathroom. After his shower, he seemed to be hurrying about the house, gathering up more clothes, putting them in the suitcase, zipping them closed and stacking them up in the living room. He put some papers, a couple books, his camera and eyeglasses in a shoulder bag, zipped it up and placed it on top of the suitcases. He went to the refrigerator, threw some things in the garbage and then carried it to the trash bins stored outside the garage door.

When he came back to the living room, he stopped and looked at me with the saddest eyes. I was sitting on the very top of the suitcases staring at him.

"Oh, Buddy," he said gently, "I’ll be back soon and my friends will come and check on you." He lifted me up, hugged me, kissed my head, put me outside on the patio, and then closed and locked the sliding door. He carried the suitcases to his car, turned on the alarm system (he's tripped it several times and the noise scares me to death), then he backed out of the garage, closed its door and was just about ready to drive off when he looked back at the house.

I was sitting on the front sidewalk all by my lonely self. I’d raced around the side of the house, jumped the fence and wanted to watch him to see if he was truly leaving. Joe told lots of people how sad he was to see me watching him drive off.

A few hours later, the sun was up and shining and I went to watch the birds at the feeder in the back yard. Then, I heard the side gate open and one of Joe's lady friends appeared. She had a key to the house and opened it right up. She didn't need to invite me into my own house. I just followed her everywhere she went. She let me walk around the house as she was getting ready to give me some more food. I wasn't particularly hungry but ate the entire meal as she sat for awhile on the patio and read her book. She was a much faster reader than Joe. Remember how long it took him to get through "Out of Africa?"

Pages were turned quite soon and that was fun to watch. She then patted my head, locked the house and drove off, leaving even more food, fresh water and some treats outside. She even brought me a nice blanket and folded it up on one of the patio chairs.

The next day, a different lady stopped by to check on me. I was used to being alone during the day, quite frankly, so these afternoon visits screwed up my schedule. But I didn't mind. I could resume my afternoon snooze once they departed.

The following day another different lady and her skinny daughter arrived. They were very cheerful and gushy. The daughter always wanted to hold me or have me sit on her lap but she was very bony. I much prefer a bit more flesh if I’m going to get cuddled. Anyway, I was happy to see someone and the daughter was pretty good at playing with my toys. You may remember that I was never enamored of these noisy plastic balls, spangled stuffed fish, or scratch pads. I did like to play with the furry catnip stuffed mice and when the girl hit on this toy we had quite an afternoon together. But they exhausted me and I chased a bird over at the feeder and then watched them from the top of the potting shed lock the house back up.

Soon the daily visits became my new pattern of life. It was amusing to see who would arrive and how much food and attention I could coax out of them. These ladies always smelled so nice — not that Joe stunk, but there wasn't much to him. These ladies often smelled like flowers, grass, and exotic spices. Anyway, they never stayed overnight and frankly I missed Joe and wondered when he might come back.

I had to be careful not to wander off too far during the day because I couldn't always judge when one of these ladies would come by. There was a handy man who often helped Old Wes next door. He was loud and talked a lot. He liked to bang the scrap metal he was collecting whenever he was around and, frankly, I was afraid of him. Sometimes I’d be in a neighbor's yard and hear commotion over at Joe's only to find it was the handy man and not one of the ladies. By now you know that I much prefer women but am happy to live with Joe.

One day I was a couple of yards over and had spent most of that morning and afternoon watching the owners move away. Nothing particularly interesting other than lots of movement. I got bored and hungry and decided to go check on Joe's house.

When I got there, the back door was wide open. I smelled the air but couldn't identify it as one of the ladies.

I let out a loud yet questioning, "Meeeeeooooow?"

Then I walked toward the hallway and saw the black suitcases on the floor in the back bedroom, I turned and there was Joe, sitting at the computer checking his email.

I ran over to him and jumped from floor to lap with one excited motion. We hugged for at least a minute!

Then I jumped down and let him have it.

He was still learning cat expressions but I made it very clear to him he was never to leave again, ever. How I didn't know where he was or if he’d ever come back and how worried I had been. The tone of my voice made it very clear. I then jumped up onto the bed and let him have it again. He was never to leave me ever again. So as to be sure he got the message. I jumped down and went beside the chair and repeated the scolding.

Joe just laughed again and again and picked me up and hugged me. I didn't return the gesture but I was very glad to see him. A few weeks later, I took a drastic step to make Joe's departures more bearable.

Here's what I did ... to be continued

So Joe was busy at work. That was his regular schedule during the week and I was left to visit Old Wes or play in the shrubbery and tall grass in the back yard or just catch up on some sleep. This routine suddenly got a bit boring and with Joe traveling more — sometimes gone for days on end — I was left to the care of his women friends whom I loved a great deal. But I had to face the fact that I was lonesome. Cats aren't just solitary animals forever. We like to have the occasional pleasure of chatting, purring, smelling, grooming, wrestling, and scrapping with one of our own kind.

Other cats wandered in and out of the rose garden and I mostly chased them off. A few, who lived in the neighborhood and were passive, I just stared at for hours. We faced off, knew our territory and just watched each other, a la Robert Frost's "good fences make good neighbors."

One day, however, I discovered a little ginger kitty who was starving and roaming the neighborhood aimlessly. In fact, he was delirious and confused. I don't think we’ll ever know the full story of how such a well behaved cat, one that was friendly, approached everyone — cat, dog, and human alike — with equal enthusiasm was left to starve to death.

Feral cats aren't friendly to humans and to most other domesticated cats. They’ve had very bad upbringings in vacant lots, under thick bushes and inside old buildings. There's plenty of bird and rat to feed on so they survive, but they have skittish personalities, crude manners, and fleas.

This sweet little ginger kitty was not feral.

Here are my two theories which I shared with Joe. One, he was raised by humans and his curiosity got the best of him. He might have climbed into a box and the box was comfortable and fell asleep but the box was in the bed of a truck and the truck took off down the road. He got scared and jumped out at the first opportunity. Unfortunately he ended up in a strange place with no clue as to how to get home. This is a plausible explanation and one that I like to think happen. Now that we’ve come to know him, he's apt to do things which more experienced felines might think twice about.

The other explanation which I know happens is this. Once he was no longer a tiny cuddly kitten and had entered his teenage years. The people who cared for him dumped him in a strange neighborhood because they lost interest in caring for him. Yes, I know people reading my column will find this unbelievable and reprehensible, but I must tell you that it happens all the time. Many people still treat animals like we are disposable items and I mean really unconcerned for our welfare. The same people, Joe and I suspect, treat other human beings with little dignity as well. All we can do is call them out on this behavior. It's cruel and heinous to take an animal raise it up and then abandon it when it's no longer "cute" and when proper care is more demanding.

Those are my two theories but they don't much matter to me now. I found this little kitty and decided he should be my companion.

Now my task was to convince Joe.

I was very clever about how I went about it.

I made sure it was in the middle of the day and Joe was home. He was in the back bedroom organizing his classical music CDs. The ginger kitty was starving … and I mean this literally, not figuratively. So I lead him over to the food dish. It was full of Fancy Feast kibble … the Filet Mignon and Shrimp variety … absolutely my favorite. (I mentioned before that I was content with plain ole Wiskas but they either changed the formula or my taste got more sophisticated. Joe tried to give me Wiskas once again after we ran out of the Fancy Feast but I wouldn't eat it. I stared at it, and looked at Joe with great disappointed. Soon he was running off to the pet food store to get the kind that I would eat. He donated the Wiskas to the animal shelter and they were happy to have it.)

So with the ginger boy in tow, I showed him the food dish on the patio. And he quickly stuck his face in it.

While he was having what seemed to be the first decent food he ate in two weeks, Joe came into the living room and saw this new kitty feeding at the family trough.

Joe stood still.

"Buddy's going to have a fit if he sees that cat stealing his food," Joe mumbled, but then walked a bit further into the living room and saw me sitting on the other side of the hungry young cat.

We hadn't seen him staring at us. I was too busy saying to my new friend, "Yeah, eat all you want. That big guy that lives here checks the bowl every few minutes and if it's the least bit empty, he runs away and fills it right back up again."

The sliding door was open and Joe was soon standing at it.

I looked up and said, "Meow."

The new cat didn't even notice and kept eating like he didn't care what might happen to him. But, true to form, Joe just watched and I came over to the doorway and gave Joe a head butt while my new ginger friend just kept eating.

When he finished his meal, he looked up and saw Joe and me watching him. He jumped up into the air in fright and backed off quickly.

Joe and I came out onto the patio and sat down. The new guy creeped back to the bowl and continued eating. Joe looked at him carefully, noting that he could see every single bone in his rib cage!

I jumped up on Joe's lap and started purring. Joe looked at me. I looked at him. We watched the kitty eat a bit more. I nudged Joe. It was clear wheels were turning inside Joe's head. What was he going to do.

"I really don't want another cat," he said out loud to me. "But he is starving. Well maybe I can find a home for him." Joe got up, went to the kitchen, fetched a can of Grilled Tuna with Gravy, put it in a dish and then set it in front of the new guy who never moved an inch away from the dish or Joe's hand.

We watched him consume the entire bowl.

Then, out of nowhere, the new kitty stopped eating, walked a few paces away from us, bent over and barfed on the patio. He was so excited to get real food after so many days that he ate it too quickly and his little stomach couldn't handle it all.

I still laugh at the expression on the new kitty's face. He was surprised this even happened, embarrassed by his behavior, and stood there trembling about this terrible first impression. It was greeted with a shake of Joe's head and soon Joe went inside and brought out the water bowl. The kitty regained his composure in a minute or so, drank some water and tried to re-consume his mess.

"Can we keep him?" I tapped Joe with my front paw and kept nudging him but he didn't seem too responsive.

After five years of living with the big guy, I knew how to bring him around. We needed to include my new friend in our family. The "Can we keep him? Can we keep him?"-style of begging just wouldn't work with someone like Joe. I’d have to use a more subtle approach and I’d need my new friend to cooperate a little better than this.

Whereas it took Joe months to land on my name "Buddy," he immediately looked at my ginger kitty and gave him a name — "Freddie the Freeloader." And that first name stuck, although Joe tried to dignify the little guy's somewhat derogatory title by registering him at the vet's as Frederick Pinknose — because it really was pink.

And here's what Joe did next … to be continued

Joe spent the next week studying Freddie and I spent the next week studying Joe. I had to convince the big guy that I really wanted Freddie to stay as part of our family. Here was my plan. Fred and I would be inseparable. What I did, he would do. If I wanted to sleep beneath a rose bush, he’d be snoozing next to me. If I was on the hunt, he’d stay beside me and wait for the kill. If I went to visit Old Wes next door, he’d go with me but keep his distance. Whatever he might do on his own, I would tell him to knock it off and just do what I do. Fortunately, whenever Joe was watching the two of us during those first days, he saw me licking Freddie's face or the two of us touring the rose garden together. All very congenial.

At least in the first week, we kept the wrestling matches to a minimum. The rule here was simple. No matter how the scrap started — I win. That victory needed to be accompanied by very loud and convincingly pathetic cries from Fred, usually with me sitting on top of his belly.

Joe got used to our playtime together and seemed to understand that Fred was a good thing for me. He still told his friends, however, that he was looking for a home for a sweet little kitten. Fortunately, Freddie didn't get the feline shyness gene that many American short hairs have. He’d go to anyone, rub his or her leg and jump up on a warm lap.

Unlike the purr I was able to muster with ease, Fred's was still a squeaky teenage buzz — one you might not hear unless your ear was on his chest. Still, there were many times that Joe seemed to enjoy having the ginger kitty sit on his lap and, of course, Freddie loved it.

I found Fred in the early fall so I suspect he was born in the spring as so many of Salinas’ cats are. Now that those early morning hours were getting chillier and chillier, the three of us: Joe, Fred and me, were spending more time indoors.

One day, Joe said to someone on the phone, "I can't have Fred spraying all over the house." I never had that problem as I was neutered early on but Fred came to us in tact. Joe liked to keep a clean house and had watched several roaming neighborhood males leaving their scent all over the rose garden and the windows on the sliding glass doors.

Joe brought down the vet cage, put some towels on the bottom, lifted up Freddie who was very scared — but I have to admit expressed his fear without much drama — dropped him in the cage and took off to the vet.

Joe came home alone and we cuddled a bit. I thought it would play well though if I went over to Fred's favorite toy and sniffed it and then looked up at Joe sadly. That worked pretty well in slowly changing Joe's position on Freddie. So did the vet bill which included a round of all the shots and his operation. Freddie was becoming another of Joe's investments. Remember how he went on and on about me being worth $600? Well, he decided all on his own that I was now — considering vet costs, pet care, and inflation — capping out around $1300.

Two days later, I was right in the room when Joe brought Freddie home, eagerly wanting to catch up on his adventure. My ginger boy was a bit wobbly on his feet. He looked very grateful to be back home. I ran over to him and smelled him and the carrier and then turned and looked at Joe with the stare I had perfected. It said, "We need to keep this cat."

Freddie walked over to his favorite toy. I’d mentioned that I was never keen on stuffed toys having had so much experience with the live variety. When you got tired of knocking a living creature around, you could always regain your energy by eating them. Fred, on the other hand, adored this stuffed cotton mouse. It had a cute little rattle inside it, cost a fraction of his other toys, but was the source of hours of enjoyment. He carried the dirty red thing around in his mouth all the time.

Even though Joe would generously bring home cleaner versions of it. This dirty red toy was THE toy.

Freddie often carried it out into the garden and then forget where he dropped it. Joe would be busy pulling weeds, spot it, grumble and throw it back toward the patio. A great game! Out of nowhere Freddie would dart right to it, pick it up and trot back into the house with the toy in his mouth again. He’d throw it up in the air in the living room, catch it and continue this antic until the rattling stuffed mouse slid out of reach under the couch. Joe would spot Freddie on the floor desperately trying to reach under the heavy piece of furniture with front legs completely extended.

Back to the operation, I stayed with Freddie for most of that day. Joe had gone off to work and left me to handle the post-ops. There are times when if you just said nothing, things would have been fine. But I had to say something, I had to tease him just a bit. I’m top cat.

I had thoroughly checked out Freddie's scar and it seemed to be healing up well.

He had to watch how he sat down so as not to hurt himself but other than that we were both confined to the house for the day.

When Joe came home it was already dark, he found Fred sitting on the top of the back of the big comfy chair in the living room. "Well, I guess you’re feeling better now if you managed to climb way up there," Joe said and patted his head.

Joe dropped his briefcase on the dining room table and called out my name, "Hey Bud, where are you?"

No response.

He walked over to the bedroom, turned on the lamp beside the bed and spotted me curled up on top of the quilt. My paws covered my face

"There you are. What's up with you?" he said and reached over and pulled my paws away from my face.

"Oh my God," he cried and picked me up to get a better look. There was a big scratch from one cheek across my nose to the other cheek.

"How did that happen?" he asked, "You’ve been inside all day?"

Here's how "that" happened. Remember just a bit ago I mentioned that it's better sometimes to say nothing? I was happy that Freddie was back and decided to show my joy and affection by teasing him.

"Hey Fred," I said, "Do you hear bells ringing? No, I guess not." After several of these taunts aimed at the poor kid who was just neutered, Fred had had enough and swatted me back. I was embarrassed by my behavior but I thought it was a funny and clever thing to say -- at least at that time.

It wasn't a deep scratch but I learned my lesson.

So here's what Joe did next ... to be continued

Having more or less perfected Joe's behavior, I thought it was time for me to focus on giving Freddie some training. Joe was a great sport about it as he seemed to enjoy Freddie's often peculiar antics; well at least day-to-day actions different from mine.

I always thought Mr. Frederick Pinknose just wasn't very bright and that explained everything. He did so many silly things and he did them all the time. For instance, when it was time for me to go in or out through the patio's sliding door, I did so quickly and directly without looking from side to side. Fred on the other hand would behave like he was going to race right through the door and then would stop suddenly — half in, half out — and adjust the fur on his white cheek. I had to warn him, when we were finally alone, to watch out for that. "Joe's used to my behavior," I said, "and if you start doing things like that he's likely to cut you in two with that sliding door and not even notice he did it."

"Move it!" Joe yelled at Freddie, time after time. Finally, it took several boots in the rear from Joe to Fred for our ginger friend to learn to get completely through the door before he fixed his face.

Again, Joe was used to me coming and going through that door. Remember my most obvious feature? I don't have a tail. So you can imagine how this threw Joe's timing off. When I wanted out, Joe would come to the door, slide it open, "tick-tock-tick," and then slide it closed. So when Freddie tried it, the maneuver turned into: slide it open, "tick-tock-tick--yikes," the tail. It took Joe several tries and Fred got a few close calls and one or two actual pinches before my housemates got their new rhythm down pat.

Another habit of Freddie's — totally different from mine — was his plopping down in front of the closed kitchen cabinet door that held the food. He could have sat anywhere else in the world but chose that one inappropriate spot.

Every morning Joe went to the kitchen to make coffee and then prepare out breakfast. How could he do that when Fred was clearly sitting in front of the door that contained the food? How was Joe going to fill the food dish if the critter he's trying to feed is performing morning ministrations in the very spot that slows the feeding process down? Joe, still half asleep, got used to kicking Freddie out of the way with his bare foot or banging the cupboard door a couple of times on Fred's skull to get him to move out of the way.

It's those episodes that gave me my doubts about Freddie's overall mental capacity. We all can't be geniuses — I know that. But I always had the sense to sit in the doorway a few feet back and observe the feeding prep from a distance with an appreciative smile.

However, considering that Joe at one time was adamant about getting rid of the little guy entirely, Freddie in his own way endeared himself to him and eventually made this idea of dumping the kid on someone else unthinkable.

Fred was very soft and somehow kept his kittenish pelt as cushy as the day he was born. I loved to bite his head just to taste it and of course our wrestling matches were a great way to enjoy his fluffy coat. My fur was fine and healthy but much more hairy. Fred's was this adorably soft stuff that everyone loved to touch. Like I said when I introduced him — he was the perfect boy toy.

One other change I noticed in Joe, once we had officially adopted this additional member of the family, was the fact that the big guy stopped making up and then singing songs about me. And I was thankful that Joe got over this. I would have been mortified at the time if someone from the outside had heard any of his caterwauling. It's so far in the past now that it doesn't seem important anymore but I thought at the time it was pretty nutty stuff. I’m not making any of it up either. By now, you’ve come to trust what I’m telling you.

The first original composition he inflicted on me was a simple one, kinda like a high school cheer, "My, My Kitty is the Best-est Kitty, Best-est Kitty in the World. My, My Kitty is the Best-est, Best-est, Best-est Kitty in the World. Go Buddy!" That was the gist of most of these ditties as well but they often got quite complicated.

Take for instance this one, "There's ... a ... kitty on the bed and his name is Buddy. He's got no tail and his paws are muddy. Get off that bed! You wanna be dead? I’ll kick ya in the head ... My ... Buddy ... he's my baby ... he's my baby ... now!"

These songs usually also involved a rudimentary dance routine wherever and whenever the muse clubbed Joe. I was scared at first, but then I just learned to go with the flow and it would be over soon. Then, with the entrance of Freddie into our lives, Joe lost interest in making up stupid songs.

So let's go to the next part of my training — teaching Freddie to hunt.

I was skilled at whacking spitzies in the air, on the land and by the sea — if you’ll accept a birdbath as the closest thing to that we have in our yard.

Apparently Freddie was raised indoors or at least he was always well fed as I soon discovered he did not have one bit of skill about living off the land and feeding himself. I take that back. He had a way to get food but that's not my point and will be a topic for later in the series.

Fred's very secretive about his background, anyway, and he rarely mentions anything about it. But, it clearly had nothing to do with birds, rats or mice.

Picture this. Joe's backyard is very private, surrounded by a fence. In front of the fence on one side is the potting shed, one side the patio and the other two sides climbing roses and shrubs. In front of all of those are more roses, then a ditch to drain the yard and then a center grassy part. In the center of this lawn was an ornate, metal, post-like contraption from which a wooden and glass bird feeder hung.

Every couple of days, Joe filled the feeder with bait (that's what I call all those nasty seeds anyway). The birds come flying in and land on the iron curls, then jump down to the feeder.

After lecturing Freddie on how to hunt and showing him some of my simpler techniques, he did this — walked slowly to the center of the lawn, sat directly below the feeder, and looked up with a "come on spitzies, I’m ready for you now" stare.

I took a couple of deep breaths.

We waited for a few minutes and, of course, nothing happened. No bird was going to land while a hungry cat was sitting in clear sight right below the food. Freddie eventually got bored and joined me under a rose bush.

"There just weren't any birds out today," he told me when he arrived.

"Look," I said.

Ten sparrows and house finches were perched on the feeder and the pole going at the seeds as fast as they could shuck ‘em and swallow ‘em now that the coast was clear. Joe was watching the training session from the house.

Here's what he did next ... to be continued

Joe noticed Freddie's struggle to learn how to hunt birds and decided to help him out. He pulled up the ornate wrought iron pole on which hung the bird feeder and moved it a bit closer to the edge of the lawn. This way Fred would have a shorter distance to run from under a rose bush and jump at a spitzie. It was still in perfect view of the chair in the living room where Joe normally sat and read the newspaper or looked through a magazine. The feeder was packed full of seeds.

As soon as Joe vacated the area, the birds hit on that feeder and fought for space in line on the metal curls that decorated the pole's top. The instincts of California house finches provide one advantage for both cats and raptors. These birds are obsessed with who gets to sit where and for how long, spilling seeds all over the ground while they are jockeying for position. They spend more time doing this than actually eating and often get so involved in these little territory disputes and seat preference squabbles that they don't notice I’m slowly sneaking up on them until I pounce and it's then way too late to flee. Success!

This entire cat versus bird thing was still not very firm in Joe's conscience but I was winning him over.

Back in my first year with Joe, I picked up on his disgruntled look when he stared over at a neighbor's backyard. That person was playing loud music with an incessant thumping beat. Joe found it restive to pull weeds in quiet, cut off spent rose blooms and walk about in his own private garden. This noise was an obnoxious interruption of his peace of mind. It irritated him to no end. He grumbled a lot to me and eventually gave up and went indoors. The neighbor was on the other side of a tall fence and Joe wasn't even certain who was living in that house or where the racket was actually coming from.

Well, it just so happened that this same backyard neighbor had gone into the extremely unprofitable business of breeding zebra finches. Joe discovered this fact because, while working in the garden, he’d heard a flock of these exotic birds making their sudden little squeaky chirps and also caught the neighbor saying something to someone about his need to "clean up the aviary." When Joe returned to the garden after about an hour, he was quite amused to see me walking about on the grass with an Australian zebra finch in my mouth. After all, who doesn't like "a bit o’ Australian tucker?"

"You are going to get both of us into a lot trouble," Joe said to me with a threatening tone but then mixed up his message with a "what a good kitty you are!" and a pat on the head. Anyway, the zebra finch was pretty plump and surprisingly tasty. When Joe went indoors, I thought I’d do him a favor. I sat on the top of the fence post watching the neighbor work in his aviary. He was busy gathering up dirty newspapers, refilling water containers and failed to notice that this one bird had gotten around behind him and went right out the door into a tree. Free game and open season! I I felt no remorse in terminating his freedom after such a short time.

Let's get back to Freddie. I coached him again and again on how to sneak up and seize the bird when it's looking the other way. My new lesson of the day, which is quite advanced for most cats, was teaching Fred that just because you couldn't see the bird anymore doesn't mean he no longer exists. In fact, as the busy little guy pecks away at seeds in the feeder, he will eventually disappear from sight. That's the best time to attack from underneath. You have to guess about where he should be and most of the time, you’ll be dead on — or rather, he’ll be dead and you’ll be on your way to a snack.

After changing the position of the wrought iron pole, Joe went inside the house and was busy walking back and forth doing some weekly chores. I was still monitoring Fred's progress from my cool spot in the garden.

Joe had stopped once and looked at the large number of birds flitting about the feeder. He noticed no sign of either of us cats and proceeded into the bedroom. He returned to the living room about five minutes later and looked at the birds still having a great meal. Then, he went into the kitchen and was putting groceries away. He’d bought some things for the bathroom and was taking them over to it when out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a very long ginger-colored animal dangling from the feeder.

It was Freddie.

Out onto the patio came Joe. Freddie had caught the bird as it was eating at the feeder. Fred's front paws, claws extended, had the bird squashed onto the perch. Unfortunately, Fred was dangling in mid-air holding on to the bird and to the feeder with his outstretched front legs. To drop down to the ground meant giving up his catch. Freddie looked over his shoulder to Joe and gave him this very pathetic "I-really-didn't-think-this-through" look.

Joe laughed out loud. Fred hung on for a couple of minutes more but fell to the ground. The bird flew off. And I took a deep breath, knowing that any skill worth having takes time and practice to acquire and that Freddie had come a long way since we adopted him.

So with every day that passed, Freddie and I became more and more of a team. He had this very endearing habit that none of us: not me, not Joe, not Joe's lady friends, not Joe's family visitors had ever witnessed before or could understand. When Fred was happy — or even just contented — he liked to jump two feet in the air and then proceed happily on to his next activity. Absolutely charming and absolutely unexplainable. So that's that.

His exuberance was often a bit misplaced. What's there to be jumping in the air for? It's raining outside, Fred! Occasionally, I had to swat him when his lightheartedness interfered with me just wanting to walk into the house. I hate being pushed around and this only got worse as my back began to hurt more and more. But I’ll tell you about how that all occurred later.

Joe and I noticed another quality of Fred's that was different from most cats. When he took a nap, he fell asleep very soundly and I could always sneak up on him and bite him on the ear. Even when Joe was moving the sleeping Fred from the bedspread to the bedroom chair, Fred would stay limp, barely open his eyes, and once put down go right back to sleep. There have been plenty of times usually coinciding with a full moon that Freddie was out all night long. Those days for me stopped a while back but Fred loved to be out prowling in the moonlight. When he finally dragged himself into the house in the a.m., he was totally wasted. He’d eat his breakfast, look for a quiet place in one of the backrooms, curl up and sleep all day long.

I’ve always been a light sleeper and as my mobility got more and more challenged, I slept even less well. I’ll go into further detail about my health issues but that can come later. In these early days with Fred we were quite a pair of athletes.

It was a great joy to checkmate a neighboring cat. Without Fred, I’d have to square off with every infringing stranger, stare them down, hiss and growl, and eventually chase them off. With two of us, we could get on either side of the interloper and put serious pressure on them. They’d usually squirt out from between us and think twice about ever returning.

During this period, Satan arrived in the neighborhood. This evil cat caused no end of trouble to Fred, to Joe, and especially to me. Satan was an unneutered feral cat. Unlike most of those who scatter at the first sign of trouble, this demon went looking for it. In fact, Satan took every opportunity to spit at Joe and to bully him right out of his own garden. When this devil cat came around, day or night, he sprayed all over Joe's sliding glass doors and all over the rose bushes. That's right. He was ready to play Mr. Toughguy with our own Joe!

So here's what Freddie and I did to protect Joe ... to be continued

Joe didn't know anything about Satan, had no idea some cats were turned toward evil right from the beginning and could not be rehabilitated. Evil is what evil does and this cat could write the book on doing bad things. The devil cat had his eye out for Joe's backyard since he discovered that Joe left a bowl of fresh kibbles on the back table every morning before he left for work. And expensive kibble at that!

The fact that this yard, excuse me, belonged to Freddie and me, mattered not to this uncouth intruder. Few things our size could ever get him out of the yard.

While Joe was at work, the devil cat arrived helped himself to our lunch and then curled up in a sunny part of the rose garden. If you’ve missed something in this narrative, let me repeat. That sunny spot was MY sunny spot. That rose garden was MY rose garden. When I walked over and asked him in cat language to "vacate the premises," he spit at me. Freddie soon joined me to lend his voice to our chorus of growls and eviction notices, but Satan would not move.

Our staring, spitting and growling was going to get ugly. I knew it was.

Finally, I had had enough and charged right at him biting his rump. He tried to knock me over but I stood my ground.

Satan ran toward the fence and darted right up it. As soon as Satan took off, Freddie chased right after him and followed him up the fence, expecting him to keep going into the neighbor's yard. But Satan stopped at the top of the fence and continued to growl and hiss while Freddie smacked right into him. The devil cat was now furious and took a long hard swipe at my ginger kitty. Freddie ducked but didn't go down low enough and Satan's claw sliced into the tip of Freddie's handsome little ear. The force of that attack and the pain Freddie felt knocked him off the fence and he tumbled right into a rose bush.

I ran over to Freddie and was about to take on the devil cat again when the monster took off running right through the rose garden again and out into the front yard.

Meanwhile, Freddie was crying like a baby. Cat's ears are sensitive and should not be fooled around with. He hid underneath the table in the potting shed trying to regain his composure. It took a lot of coaxing on my part to get him to come out. I told him that things like this were going to happen in life and that he had better get used to it.

When Joe came home he was accompanied by three of his lady friends — the very ones who always buy me presents. They had been to a concert and had a great time and were just bubbling with happiness.

As soon as Freddie walked through the sliding door, however, and they saw the blood, the mood in the room changed dramatically. Panic and loud chatter ensued.

Joe went for a wash cloth and some warm water and started cleaning the matted blood and dirt from Freddie's ear, face and neck. Two of the ladies worked in hospitals so they went to Joe's medicine chest to see what they could find and returned with cotton swabs and hydrogen peroxide.

There was a lot of fussing going on throughout the make-shift emergency room procedures taking place in the living room. I eventually sat on Joe's lap after he conceded the patient to the lady nurses who energetically held mister squirmy-wormy tight and worked on his ear.

Joe said to them that Freddie was going to be fine. "Don't fuss. He must have gotten scared and caught his ear on a wire fence."

A great deal of nuzzling and cuddling and wound kissing (that's a figurative statement, by the way) took place and after they all enjoyed a cup of tea and told more stories about sick animals and sick patients and old hospitals where they once worked and wretched diseases. They departed.

The next morning, neither Joe nor I could find Freddie. We both knew that he did not leave the house so the search was on. We finally found him underneath the bed in the back bedroom in the far corner of the house hidden behind some U.S. Postal Service mailing boxes. Joe had to grab him by the scruff of his neck to extricate him and see what was going on.

Poor Freddie. He was so lethargic he couldn't even hold his head up or cry. And his ear — poor baby — was the size of a small lemon.

Joe called the lady vet, got an appointment for later in the morning, packed up our little ginger boy, and hauled him up to the Veterinary Service in Prunedale.

When they got home, I heard Joe on the telephone saying that they drained the abscess on Freddie's ear, gave him a shot of antibiotics, and made up a bottle of antibiotics in drop form for Joe to squirt into Freddie's mouth each morning until it was all gone. The vet said the infection was serious and they were going to do their best to save as much of his ear as possible — fighting the infection from inside and out. Freddie was young and healthy and should respond to the medicine. Joe had to keep the wound open and bathed in peroxide until it healed.

Freddie was kept inside for a few days. His ear had suffered a traumatic auricular hematoma, otherwise known as "cauliflower ear." It was common in boxers, wrestlers, and rugby players and was a result of being punched in the ear. That causes the flesh to separate from the cartilage and the space filling with blood clots and tissue which makes them look like the aforementioned vegetable. When I heard this comparison to sports injuries, I laughed. Freddie was the least athletic cat in the world.

"Oh, well, the lady vet said, ‘It adds to his character." And indeed, to this day, Freddie's had a great life with one pointed ear and one snubbed and kinda bent over.

I wish I could tell you that this episode ended our visits from Satan, but it did not.

Joe washed his spray off the sliding door — grumbling all the time — only to have the devil cat squirt some more onto the clean window. Satan himself frequently showed up and plopped himself in the middle of the yard. We avoided him as much as possible but we couldn't make him go away.

Satan's visits coincided with the increasing problems I was having with my back. It was getting to be harder and harder to jump down. I could manage to scale to the highest heights, but getting down now, which was once no big deal, became painful. My back hurt for hours.

As I depended more and more on my front two legs, I built up a set of buff front end muscles. The other change happened because of my decreasing mobility. I got a middle age pot belly. Yes, I was less active and yes, I had no intention of eating less. Ah, life was too sweet. Joe used to turn me over and rub my big belly.

The devil cat returned daily. He hated Joe, too, and would sensibly walk out of the yard if Joe came outside and approached him.

One day, about three or four months after Freddie's encounter. I was heading toward the front yard and the devil cat stood between me and the fence.

When I moved forward, Satan responded by ... to be continued

Running through Joe's backyard are several ditches that join up and proceed under the side fence to the front yard. For years, the "under the boards" passage was an alternative to climbing up and over the seven foot fence. There were times, I must admit, when I wanted to be discreet about my comings and goings and took the low road. Little did I know that one day the "over the top and down again" passage would be unattainable for me. That day was hurried along after the ugly incident I’m about to relate took place.

So, one day, there I was ready to go "under" when out from behind a rose bush came the devil cat blocking the route entirely. He was in and out of our yard so frequently then that it was hard for my nose to figure out a fresh scent. I wasn't at all happy to see him and I let him know it.

Before I get into describing the nasty confrontation we had, I thought I’d give you an idea of what Satan looks like. I say "looks like" because he may still be out there but hasn't made his presence known to us in at least two years.

First of all, his fur was a mottled gray color not unlike the color of a cooked McDonald's hamburger. The fur was more hairy than soft — nothing like Freddie's caress-able pelt. In addition, Satan's fur had a pervasive spiky-ness to it that fit his evil character perfectly. His tail was long but did not have a hook at the end like many depictions of the devil do.

Satan's head was its most distinctive feature. It was misshapen and black, or at least very dark gray. It looked more like the head of a Brussels Griffon than a cat. I know what those little toy dogs look like: smashed-in face, but not too smashed-in; jowly, but not too jowly; and with tiny pointed ears sticking mostly straight up. How do I know about Brussels Griffons? Joe adores trying to watch the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in February each year. I say "trying to" because I don't think during all the years we’ve sat together taking on the two-night marathon he's ever made it through either night without falling asleep. His head usually starts bobbing with the entrance of the Affenpinscher and is totally in dreamland by the time the Yorkie arrives.

One day while Freddie and I were sunning ourselves on the patio. Satan appeared, walked between the two of us, entered the living room through the sliding door and helped himself to our kibbles in our indoor food bowl. Only Freddie and I had permission to enter that house, the devil was not welcome there. It just so happened that during this infraction, Joe got up from the computer in his bedroom and walked down the hall. He noticed from the corner of his eye a gray mass feeding inside the house. He doubled back and stared directly at Satan who turned, looked at Joe, hissed, lifted his tail up and paraded out the door — the air of entitlement aimed at Joe.

In fact, while I’m on the topic of home invasions, let me tell you about two others.

Number one: On a warm summer evening, Joe left the sliding door open so we could come and go at will. It let the cooler night air gently waft into the living room. Joe was watching TV in his bedroom and got up to get something to drink. As he entered the semi-lit living room, he noticed something feeding from our bowl. I’m black and white and easily seen in dim light. Freddie is a dusty ginger color and a bit harder to spot, but Joe knew immediately it wasn't either of us. He flicked on the hall light and said, "Who are you?" then, "What are you?"

An opossum was eating our kibbles. Joe had heard horror stories about what could happen if these animals get scared so he kept his motions slow and methodical. The critter got confused and walked past the open door toward the dining room. It stopped and looked up at the split leaf philodendron. "Oh god," Joe said, "Don't climb up that. You’ll knock it over." Then, Joe managed to open the sliding door wider and sheepdogged the animal out the door.

Both Freddie and I sat still on the patio and watched the opossum exit. We stared at Joe and communicated a uniform message. "Don't look at us. We didn't invite it in."

Number two: This one was scary, especially for Joe, who came home and interrupted it. It was the end of the day in February, I think, because it was dark outside. Fred and I were waiting on the patio for our evening snack and to say hello to Joe. The cleaning lady had spent the afternoon in the house so if you remember my story about "kitty kat no good in house, kitty kat go outside" you’ll know that we learned to steer clear of our domicile while she cleaned it.

We heard the side door to the garage open softly. Then the door from the garage to the kitchen opened up and we saw two figures walk through the kitchen into the dining area. We didn't know who they were. Then the big garage door opened and Joe drove up in the driveway. It was a Thursday because it was the night when Joe had to put the trash on the curb — Freddie and I love to chase around on the front lawn and scratch trees while Joe is wheeling the bins to the street. At that time, he kept the recycle bin in the garage. He didn't pull inside so he could take it to the curb.

As soon as these two dark figures in the living room heard the garage door open, they ran through the living room, slipped on the doormat and huddled up against the front door.

"What do we do now?" one of them said to the other. "Just be quiet."

The truck door open was open and the lights were on so Joe could see better. Once he looked inside the garage though, he noticed that the door to the kitchen was wide open. He figured the cleaning lady had forgotten to close it.

Joe walked up to the garage, grabbed the handle of the recycle bin and wheeled it out onto the driveway. When he looked up one of the young men was standing on the sidewalk just off the front porch. Joe assumed it was a high school kid selling candy for the marching band. So he walked right up to the guy whose head was down. But before Joe could say anything the kid took off running across Old Wes’ yard and ran down the street.

Joe was stunned. He saw the front door of his house was open. Another kid came out of the house wearing a black hoodie and resembling just about every other kid in Salinas. This boy jumped the fence and disappeared in Wes’ backyard.

It was the only time I ever saw Joe scared and not knowing what to do. He was afraid that a party had taken place and his home was trashed. Joe called 911 on his cell phone. Cell phones then were still so new they had to redirect his call, but he eventually got to the Salinas Police Department. He gave a description of the first kid — red sweatshirt, light colored blue jeans, short blond curly hair, thin and the second one dark hair, brown complexion, black sweatshirt with hood.

"Joe told the police that he wouldn't go into the house until one of them came with him. He stood and waited which seemed like forever. Suddenly, a police car drove up behind him and said, "Stay put. We got one and he had meth on him and he's going to jail."

When the officer returned, he and Joe went inside and discovered only a messed up doormat.

Back to my fight, Satan wouldn't budge. I swatted at him and he attacked. His claws sunk deeply into my cheek. I screamed and jumped on his back biting into his neck. He leaped up onto the top of the fence and with all my energy, I followed after him.

Then we went at it again even more viciously ... to be continued

The devil cat jumped up onto the top of the fence. I was careful in how I followed him based on Freddie's past encounter. This time, too, Satan refused to budge. So we faced off at 7 feet in the air. I was not going to surrender one inch of my yard to this dark gray shadow and I was not going to be shouted down either. The incident occurred toward the end of the day and the commotion brought Joe running out of the house. He would normally have intervened in such a nasty dispute. His very presence intimidated most feline trespassers who trespassed against us and sent them right into the valley of the shadow of death. Unfortunately, the sun was in Joe's eyes and blinded him and the climbing roses sort of hid us, too.

So the devil cat and I tangled fiercely on the fence top, snapping and swatting at each other without much real damage. Then, the monster pulled away quickly and immediately lunged at me, biting deeply into my cheek! I sunk my own teeth into his neck and tightened my grip on his body. The force of his lunge knocked me off the fence and sent me hurtling down onto the hard surface of Old Wes’ yard and out of Joe's sight.

But we fell together. He hit the adobe with a hard thump that broke our concentration and entanglement. He soon ran across the lawn and disappeared out an open gate.

I got the wind knocked out of me and my cheek really hurt. It took me awhile to get my strength back and pull myself back up the fence to my own yard. That's when I had to make one of those decisions that signal the onslaught of middle age — the equivalent of finding one's first gray hair. That would be the last time I would jump up on the fence in one long leap. My back was sore for a week after that fall, but I didn't complain. My climbing days were now limited to pulling myself up or squeezing underneath the fence.

A day later, Joe noticed the abscess on my cheek and tear drops forming in my eyes. He knew the swelling and the closed, unhealed wound from his experience with Freddie. When he noticed that I’d broken the abscess with my claw he quickly played doctor, drained the wound, and dabbed it with peroxide. I was soon packed into the carrying cage by my lonesome and shipped off to the lady vet.

She drained the wound and gave me a shot of anti-biotic with a vial of it made up for Joe to squirt down my throat for the next week. This tasted awfully bad.

The devil cat disappeared for several months.

Joe understood that my muddy belly came from squeezing my — OK, ample — proportions under the fence. He showed up in the garden with a jigsaw and a long extension cord. He found a place where two fence boards came together and cleverly cut half circles in each board creating a circular portal for me to go straight through the fence.

Now, I could resume my school guard duties watching children on their way to school. If their parents were walking child and dog at the same time and the dog looked like trouble, I could quietly disappear in the roses walk along side of the house and find my new door behind the hydrangea.

The passage wasn't visible from the street but once discovered the stray cats used it as well.

Joe's discovery of my increasing disability was handled well and Freddie was a lovable as ever. Joe and his friends used to laugh at the show Freddie put on during our wrestling matches.

I couldn't jump anymore but Freddie would roll over and play the weak and afflicted one whenever I sat on his stomach and bit his neck.

Joe also noted how differently I had to move with my bad back and laughed to his friends that I didn't run, prance or creep — I trotted — much like a piglet. My body while never entirely straight was now swaybacked.

Joe left his job and was now working on a book about roses. Here's what I did to help ... to be continued

Joe's rose garden takes up most of his backyard. He's been very busy working on his book about growing roses.

One day early in the morning, Joe was walking with a cup of fresh coffee back to this room to edit photographs. He spotted me sitting by the back fence with my back to him and my face toward the fence. That wasn't unusual for me as I might have been looking at a moth or spider crawling about. But I wasn't.

About a half hour later, Joe came out of his room to refill his cup. While walking through the living room, he noticed I was still in the same spot in the same position. He paused a moment but saw nothing out of the ordinary except my persistence. Freddie was nowhere in sight.

"That must be a pretty interesting moth," Joe thought. But it wasn't a moth I was looking at.

He went back to his room and continued working on the book. He was writing a paragraph or two about how cats are a good thing to have in the rose garden. The passage went something like, "Cat kills rat. Gardener buries rat next to rose bush. Rose bush blooms."

An hour passed, Joe came out again, he can't remember why, but looked out at the garden and there I was. Same spot. Some position.

He forgot what he was doing and walked out on the patio into the garden toward me to see what could be so interesting to hold my attention staring at a board. But I wasn't looking at a board.

When Joe reached me, I didn't immediately turn and say hello. I was terribly busy. My face was riveted to what was going on in the yard on the other side of the fence. A knot had fallen out of the fence giving me an unobstructed view of the yard behind me. We were getting new neighbors!

Joe laughed a lot when he realized I was in charge of my own Neighborhood Watch program. And it was a good thing, too. As the new young family that moved in also brought along two Labrador retrievers: one black and one chestnut. They eventually came over to me to say hello, the dogs that is. They didn't bark but sniffed a bunch, and made some groaning sounds. I thought I should play it safe, spit at them, and refuse to move. It wasn't a yard I ever bothered much to enter during the past few years as there wasn't much going on over there. The yard was unattended and dry. Thinking about it now, I’m not sure why I didn't use it as a toilet, but now that was out of the question.

I think my adventures over there had to do with that neighbor who raised the Brazilian finches (Remember them?) and I didn't want to push my luck should any of those tropical treats escape again and I not being able to control myself.

The two dogs were friendly and Joe went out and bought them some milk bones so they’d be friendly to him while he was coming and going in the garden. He did not want them to bark incessantly like the chihuahuas right next door to us do.

Joe worked a lot in the garden at that time, making sure that all the bushes looked great for a party he was going to have when his book got published. It had lots of new fresh mulch spread all over it and Joe was thrilled about that. Me, too, as it was a refreshingly new type of litter.

The dogs banged up against the boards in the fence a couple of times while smelling me and I noticed that two of the boards were loose. Our new neighbors were smart and would figure out that their could move the boards with their noses and escape into our yard.

The book got published and Joe had three days of open garden in his yard. Each day one or two of his lady friends who often took care of us when Joe was out of town were there.

It was great to see them again and also to greet all the incoming guests personally. They seemed to like cats and said nice things to all of us. I embarrassed Joe a little bit because out of absolutely nowhere I coughed up a hairball in the center of the yard. Joe kept telling everyone, He's never done that before, and he wasn't lying. Just was one of those things that happen. No one believed Joe even though that was the truth. Anyway, I met several new people and I’ve always loved when people made a fuss over me, even though my backbone was a bit fused.

One night Joe, Freddie and I were sitting in the living room. We’d just finished dinner when someone knocked on our door. It was still light outside so we weren't too frightened.

Joe went over to open it. I was spooked now by people knocking on the front door no matter what time it was so I went under the dining room table but Freddie was tired and just stayed on the back of the sofa in clear view of the door.

When Joe opened the front door, Brian was standing there. Brian was our neighbor in the back, the fellow I watched move in a couple of weeks before. He's the owner of the two dogs which I could tolerate.

After a quick hello, Brian looked down and before he ever got a chance to say what he came over to talk about, this came out of his unbelieving mouth.

"Is that your cat?" Brian asked and indicated Freddie who was staring up at him with a friendly smile and soon started purring.

"Uh, yes," Joe responded, hesitating a bit. And this one's mine, too. He said pointing to me looking out from under the dining room table.

"He's over at our house all the time!" Brian said. "He walks right between the two dogs, comes inside our house and eats whatever is in the dog's bowl, then jumps up onto our couch and takes a nap. We all call him, ‘Amigo.’"

Joe laughed very loudly as it was a surprise to him. Of course, I’ve known forever that Fred likes to spend his days wandering the neighborhood. When he regained his composer, he said, "His name is Freddie ... Freddie the Freeloader!" Joe continued to laugh and picked up Freddie who was as calm as ever and started a feeble struggle.

"Yeah, Buddy," Joe said and nodded over at me under the table, "Buddy brought him home one day about three years ago. He was starving. He turned out to be the friendliest, most docile cat most people have ever known."

"Too funny," Brian said and explained that the reason for his visit was to fix a few of the fence boards. They needed to be nailed down and he was happy to do it but wanted me to know that he might need access to the yard.

Joe said it wouldn't be a problem and explained how to get into the backyard when he wasn't around.

There's one other tale, I think you might enjoy and I should tell you about it next time ... to be continued

Column 26

Although Joe might not have known it, I always knew where he was in the house. He loved it when I would wander in from the patio door and head directly for him regardless of where he was. I knew what he smelled like and could hear him breathing, but Joe was always amazed and somehow proud of me for being so smart so I just went along with it. He’d love it when he was moving about the house and I was outside, usually straining my neck to spot him. One look and he knew I wanted to come inside the house and just hang with him.

The wall heater in our house was magic and as the days grew short and the nights grew cold, I spent many of them soundly sleeping on the back of the couch in a direct line from the heat of the furnace. It felt good on my back. Whenever there was sun in the garden though, you could count on me to be in it, moving with it across the yard.

Frequently, while I was snoozing under a rose bush in some sunlight, Joe would come out on the patio with the intention of combing my fur. I shed a lot – always have and that accounts for those sticky roller things in every room and in the truck. Although I didn't like it at first, I came to enjoy it a great deal, especially with my back freezing up on me. You see, I couldn't move around and get at any fleas that decided to have lunch on my rump. With a couple of combs, Joe would realize it was passed time to put on the flea medicine. The more immobile I became, the harder it was to keep myself clean.

Freddie, of course, kept his soft fur immaculate, but a little Advantage 2 never hurt either of us as we spent so much time lying about in the garden.

I loved being beside Joe. I never was in his way or under his feet. In fact, I don't recall he ever tripped over me.

One night after Joe had eaten a really big dinner and was watching yet another nature show on television – insects, this time, he let out a low groan. No matter how he positioned himself or what antacid he consumed, he could not get comfortable … or fall asleep.

Joe thought that he’d get over it, but I knew something was not right. So I stayed with him throughout the ordeal. Carefully watching him and always making contact with him to let him know I was there. He moaned and grumbled and shifted around on the bed. After each move, I’d lean against him or place my paw on his leg. I intentionally stopped the purring a bit as I wanted to make certain my bedside guardianship wasn't about how much fun I was having, but instead, expressed my concern for his condition.

Finally, Joe painfully got out of bed and drove himself to the hospital which, fortuitously, was only about five blocks from the house. Once there, the emergency room folks immediately went to work on him. I know all this from his telephone conversations and house guests. They tested his heart, solid as a rock. They x-rayed his lungs nothing extraordinary there. They gave him something with dye in it so they could see what was going on in his belly.

The doctor came in and bingo – announced it was his gall bladder, plugged up with 60 years of sediment. He came home with a packet of information, more doctor appointments and was told to stop eating all fats. No fried food – I didn't care about that; no cheese – also something I never particularly liked; no peanuts, walnuts or avocados – didn't break my heart there either; no butter or oil, that was challenge; no alcohol – not my concern; and only, the leanest of meats and fish – I’d help him out there. So until his operation two months later, he dieted and I often shared the rare filet mignon!

I thought it reasonable to be close to him and truly remained observant whenever he was home. I’d forget about hunting, Freddie was good at that now and kept the spitzy population under control. My main aim was to keep Joe company. He loved it very much.

Once he got better and was much more ambulatory, we almost returned to our previous lifestyle but Joe kept up many of these good eating habits. And I kept up my vigilance and pursuit of some of that beef tenderloin – the rarer the better.

Here's one more story I want to share. This really did happen and amused Joe to no end. For his work at the radio station, Joe often listened to all kinds of music. Mostly classical pieces composed in the 20th century and today.

As long as it was soft and smooth or fast and rhythmic, I didn't mind it too much. I’ve said I prefer the music of Claude Debussy and I often walked into the room if one of those pretty piano pieces was playing. I mean I could sit and listen to "The Girl with the Flaxen Hair" again and again without moving.

But that wasn't on his agenda one Saturday morning when he was sitting at his computer listening on the internet to pieces he was considering putting on the radio.

My place was next to Joe, not on his lap but on the carpet next to his chair.

He felt he needed to explore some of the electronic music created in the 1950s which in the end had a lasting influence more on pop music than classical music. But in the past was widely heralded as a new musical instrument literally available at the composers finger tips. If you are a fan of those corny, creepy horror films of the 1950s such as "Attack of the Crab Monsters" you’ll understand the type of music he was inflicting again on this morning.

I was in my usual place next to Joe on the carpet when it started.

It was a piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen and I forget its name. The electronic palette of the 1950s was very primitive and not then what it was to become. It's best described as loud beeps, toots and whistles with the addition of sounding like an AM radio station almost tuned in.

When it started I had no reaction whatsoever but hoped inside that this too would pass. But it didn't, it only got weirder. As it "wow—wow—wowed" ever increasingly loud then popped suddenly and whined a bit then continued like the arm of a record player which got stuck just of the groove.

After about two minutes or so – when I realized this wasn't going to stop any time soon, I lifted my head up from the floor, looked at the speaker on the desk, looked over at the speaker again, got up, looked at Joe intensely again, looked back at the speaker, shook myself, growled and trotted down the hallway stopping midway to look over my shoulder again at Joe and shake my head. I walked to the open sliding door and found in a distant corner of the garden.

Joe laughed the entire time and decided my commentary on this particular experimental piece would probably be universally shared by his listeners. The piece never found it to the airwaves.

Another encounter with the devil cat would be a costly one for all of us … to be continued

After several months, both Joe and Freddie realized I was moving very slowly.

"He still has his appetite," I heard Joe tell his friends about me, and indeed this was true. Perhaps it was Joe's kindness or he just ran out of the regular stuff, but for several days he fed us chopped fresh chicken liver washed down with tuna water.

The three of us were sitting around Joe's living room after one such meal, smacking our chops. It was a warm evening which for Salinas in July is rare. Usually the hot air in the Central Valley rises and pulls colder air off the ocean giving us our typical summertime chill.

Freddie noticed the commotion first. We both know the sound of cat feet coming over the fence into our yard. We both trotted out on to the patio to see who was visiting.

Who would have thought Satan would chose to appear on such a quiet peaceful night? But he did.

Fred and I came face-to-face with the gray beast on the floor of the potting shed.

I told him to leave and he ignored me. I may be old and my back might not work like it once did, but that's no reason to ignore me. After a few more minutes of growling and hissing, I swung a quick left into Satan's cheek and followed it with an up-cutting right and then a deep bite into his neck. I was not going to be rendered obsolete in a yard I’ve called home for a dozen years.

Unfortunately, Satan doesn't take kindly to losing battles. So he lunged back at me and knocked me right over in the dust. I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen those helpless tortoises who find themselves upside down with no way to get upright again. That would be me. So I cried out and Joe came running to the potting shed. He saw the demon devil take off toward the fence and run smack into Freddie who, always surprised by sudden actions, hissed loudly and then shrieked painfully and they ran off in two directions.

Me, on the other hand, found myself on my aching back with four paws pointing to the sky. I got a personal lift assist by Joe, who carried me back to the living room. I was livid, grumbling and inconsolable; expressed in a tone that Joe translated accurately, "That miserable swine. He’ll never come back in this yard again. I could have knocked him down. I’m still the top cat. What I say goes!" And so on, all the while Joe was petting my head.

Freddie on the other hand was no where in sight.

I sat on Joe's lap for an hour or so and then, struggled with him to let me go and lie down. When I got up, Joe noticed I’d dropped a turd on the floor. This was so unusual, Joe wasn't sure what to do. So he quickly got a wet paper towel and cleaned it up. It was then he realized that I often have trouble assuming the correct position to deposit my waste appropriately and things get stuck.

"This isn't going to get better," Joe rightly assumed.

After cleaning up the mess and feeling an evening chill, Joe closed the sliding door and we both went to watch some TV.

As we were about to put all the lights out, Joe noticed Freddie by the door wanting in — which was normal. Once the sliding door was open, Fred raced right past the food and water and went to hide in the back bedroom which was not normal but no cause for alarm.

The next morning, Joe got up and let me out but Freddie wasn't quite ready to go outside. Joe got busy with the normal things he does every morning and forgot about Freddie. He packed himself a lunch and check once again to make sure there was food outside and food inside and went to work.

When Joe came home that night, he let me in and we both went looking for Fred. We found him curled up under the bed in the back room. Joe hauled him out and we both gave him a thorough look-see. Yep, there it was.

The devil cat had managed to bite him in his upper front left leg. It was now abscessed, twice its size and needed draining.

Having past experience with these afflictions, Joe gathered up the hydrogen peroxide, cotton balls and swabs; and managed to drain Freddie's wound. The ailing cat drank some water, stared at his food, and slowly went back to his secret spot.

Joe checked him out again the next day and he seemed up bit brighter. I was fine, only suffering with a wounded ego, but as it turned out, it was to be my last cat fight.

When Joe next found Freddie, he was nearly lifeless. The abscess had moved lower down and settled in a bony part of his leg not possible to drain at home. Joe called the vet, packaged my friend up and disappeared.

After about two hours Joe returned home with a very sullen look and without Fred. On the phone to one of his friends, Joe described the horrors of the infection inflicted on our ginger kitty by Satan himself. The wound was in a very difficult part of the body. Clearly the devil was looking to do as much harm as possible and friendly ol’ Freddie took the brunt of the anger. Now he was suffering.

Two days later, Freddie returned. He was wearing the most ridiculous collar and came with the ends of two tubes sticking out of his leg. Joe was supposed to squirt a fluid inside the tube regularly and drain it out the bottom. Evidently, this method as painful as it must be was the only way for our little boy to heal up right.

Smartly, Joe asked for one of his nurse friends to give him a hand. I watched most of it, even though it was done outside on the patio. (Joe was afraid the purple fluid might do some serious damage indoors.) They were able to work on our boy and get him back in shape.

Joe even had to lift him up inside the litter box because with that thing around his neck he could barely move.

Of course, Freddie was the hit of the animal clinic. Even when near death, people were drawn to the little guy just like I was in the very beginning, now years ago. Apparently, he attended the clinic's morning staff meeting.

After a few weeks, Fred was back to normal. His fur had grown in and all was well again.

Not so with me when later that year, I paid my annual visit to the lady vet and she let Joe know about my future ... to be continued

Joe managed to keep Fred and me indoors one morning and I figured something was up. He’d moved his truck out of the garage, pulled down the ladder and unpacked our carrying case. We were off to our annual meeting with the lady vet. She's the one who pricks me with needles, which I hate, and then massages all of me with her strong warm hands, which makes me forget getting poked.

The carrying case holds the two of us for our short ride up to her office and we’ve shared it ever since I found Freddie ten years ago. Joe sets it up inside the garage with the outside doors closed shut to prevent an escape. Freddie gets put in first as his tolerance of confined spaces is greater than mine. Joe's learned to put me in backside first. That usually saves a heated feline discussion between Fred and me about who is going to stay on which side of the carrier. Joe locks the door, lifts up the carrier, opens the garage door and then secures it in the front seat of the truck for the duration of the ride.

When we get to the office, we sit in the waiting room with an assortment of animals. The vet has a gentle office cat that usually sits on the check out counter assessing all patients. There's usually a couple of dogs coming and going, some with bandages some not, all with cold wet noses. How do I know they’re cold and wet? Let's just say some dogs decided to see what trouble lay beyond the doors of our cage and I had to show them with a quick swipe of my front paws and a loud grumble.

Today was no different. But, we were quickly escorted into our private examination room. Freddie jumped right out as soon as the cage door was open but I’m slower now and took my time leaving the carrier and exploring the exam room.

When the lady vet opened the exam room door, I went as quickly as I could which is to say not very quickly but with a singular purpose back to the carrying case and crouched down. She went ahead examining Fred on a tabletop and then stuck him with his annual shots, rubbing the spot carefully to help him forget about any discomfort.

"What's with Buddy?" she asked.

"He's had some issues," Joe answered.

"Well, let's take a look." she said as Joe knelt down on the floor and extracted me — the reluctant patient. Then Joe started giving her the explicit details of our changed home life.

"He's incontinent," Joe said, rather insensitively I thought given my accidents weren't ever intentional or a result of any misbehavior on my part.

"Let's take a look," she said and held me tightly on the examining table. She knew how to calm me down by massaging my front half which still worked pretty well while paying close attention to my back half.

"He drops turds all around the house," Joe said, "sometimes he hits the litter box, sometimes it's near misses, other times it's right on the floor, chair, couch, cushion, bed, patio, garden or wherever. He doesn't even bother to cover them up anymore."

"It's Buddy's spinal cord," she said. "Bobtail cats usually have a problem with their backs as they get older because their spinal cords shrink. You can massage it a bit and lightly pull on his stubby tail."

During our visit the previous year, she gave Joe some glucosamine and chondroitin powder that was to be added to my food. I refused, not surprisingly, to eat any food that contained it and Joe, at 62 cents a can grew weary of throwing the stale stuff out untouched. I think the container is still in the cupboard with our regular food. She also recommended that I lose weight. And, of course, most of us who are now residing "over the hill" have no intention of giving up the one great pleasure we have left — eating, or changing dramatically the foods we love so much even though it would be better for us health-wise.

I think now that our lady vet knew all along how my story was going to end, she wasn't too concerned about my incontinence.

"You can make adjustments in the house for that. I have," she said comfortingly and supportively. She continued, "If Buddy is still eating and in no great pain, make his life as comfortable as possible for as long as possible. He's in the sunset of his years."

Those were the words which caused me to write about my life and reflect on the adventures and fun times I’ve had living with Joe and Freddie.

She then pulled out her needles and poked me good. Feeling ornery about my diagnosis, I decided to hiss and spit at her. As soon as Joe put me on the floor, I hurried into the cage and channeled a message to him, "Let's get the hell out a here!"

When we were back home, Joe created a palette for me to sleep on. It consisted of an old pillow covered by a couple of old cases and about six of his old dress shirts. He once had to wear these stiff things every day he went to work. Since he left that job, the dress shirts have hung in his closet. Between the two of us, most of them had raveled cuffs and stained armpits and hadn't been thought of by him since the going away party he was given.

Taking the lady vet's advice, Joe pulled out all of these old shirts and placed several of them on each of my favorite places to sleep around the house. If I had an accident during the middle of the night, Joe would simply remove the top shirt in the morning, shake it out in the garden and put it in the washing machine.

I was banned from the master bedroom and would never again spend an entire night there. Joe closed the door when he was ready to go to sleep.

During the summer months, Joe built a pallet for me outside and insisted I spend the entire night out there. I didn't mind too much as the yard was safe, the temperatures were mild, and the devil cat hadn't been seen since our encounter months ago. Only occasionally, when I just couldn't get up fast enough did I have an accident with my bladder.

Joe never complained much, even if he stepped on a wet spot in the middle of the night. He simply hobbled to the bathroom, washed his foot, wet to get the Oxyclean pet spray and applied it immediately. Fortunately, for him, this only happened about three or four times during my last year and usually right in front of Joe's closed bedroom door where I had fallen asleep.

We lived this way for nearly eight months and Joe never was unkind. In fact, he seemed to go out of his way to help me keep myself clean including a warm, wet rag rubbed against my bottom. I felt it my duty to grumble during each and every occasion.

Then, as this summer wound down, things for me took a sudden turn for the worse ... to be continued

After the lady vet told us my condition wouldn't improve and intimated that my health would deteriorate at an unpredictable pace, I used every opportunity I could to remind Joe of the times we spent together and the things he learned from me. I’ve always enjoyed his company and, on the few occasions of his own medical suffering: such as the extracted gall bladder, the flu, and a yanked out tooth, I stayed by his side until he was better. Joe did the same for me.

So together we sketched out little incidents we shared, and troubles we got into. Say what you might about the neighbor's Brazilian finches, I only got caught eating one of them. I was never yelled at for doing my business in Old Wes’ yard. I enjoyed the Christmases we shared and although I investigated our little mini-light tree placed on a table, I never knocked it over and I even dissuaded the always rambunctious Freddie from placing a paw on the holiday decor. I never ratted on Freddie either when I knew it was he who decided to take a snooze on top of the Christmas dining table. (The clump of ginger fur next to the centerpiece outted him.)

I once was able to leap into the air at the threshold of Joe's bedroom and land front paws on the mattress and back paws resting on the one inch foot board. I spent the past five years, however, pulling myself up onto the bed using only my front legs with my hind legs giving me a little support.

Without my staring down at Joe through the hole in the potting shed's fiberglass roof, he might not have realized it needed to be replaced. The galvanized aluminum one works much better now and gave me plenty of protection from the hot sun and the pouring rain for every season since.

Joe and I had fun recalling the surprise visitors, ultimately chasing the devil cat out of the yard, and remembering my early years pieced together from coincidences and odd circumstances. It was great fun to live in the rose garden and I took pride in Joe's effort to make it bloom. It was always a pleasure to entertain his visitors — well at least before my back seized up and I had to worry about being able to escape.

Mid-way through this past summer, Joe realized that my incontinence wasn't as frequent as it once had been. He assumed that since I was mostly living outdoors and using the palette he devised for me which was very soft and warm, I didn't really need to be inside even though he bought an enormous plastic tub of a litter box and tripled the size of our indoor toilet facilities. I soon became too weak to get myself over the edge of the new one.

No, I wasn't the sprightly young thing I was when I convinced Joe to let me live with him fourteen years ago nor was I even the pot-bellied middle-ager I had been for ten years. I was now bent over and slow, and cranky about people touching me — except Joe who knew how to do it.

When Joe was combing me one Sunday afternoon, he noticed how the shape of my body was changing. He realized that more and more of my backbone was apparent under my coat. I was losing body mass. I just didn't have much of an appetite anymore for anything.

One afternoon in August I got lucky though.

I had been over at the large basin of water Joe kept fresh on the patio and a dumb little spitzy flew down for a drink. Startled at seeing me next to the bowl, it flew in the wrong direction and ran smack into the leaves of a sago palm growing in the corner of the patio. It reversed its direction right into my mouth. I enjoyed having one last hunted meal, paraded around in front of Joe with it in my mouth, and then consumed it entirely.

The next day, Joe opened a can of tuna and gave me the water and some meat. He’d noticed I wasn't eating much and hoped this would appeal. I drank some and had a mouthful of tuna but that was about it for me. I had lost a taste for it. Joe remembered how excited I always was about getting some tuna water. My lack of interest in it made Joe very sad.

A week went by and during that time whenever Joe picked me up, he noticed he could feel more and more of my skeleton and less and less muscle. My fur, too, had lost its silky shine and no matter what Joe did to brush it, it quickly looked unkempt. It lost that wonderful fresh scent, too.

One night Joe came outside in the middle of the night to check on Freddie and me and we both popped in for a snack. He never turned the lights on but sat in the living room and played with his smart phone. When he got bored with the postings on Facebook and decided to go back to bed, he jumped in the covers and guess what he found?

Me.

It had been months since I was allowed to be with him in the bed. He’d conceded to let me watch TV with him on two or three occasions but they weren't relaxing because he was always afraid I’d have an accident. But on this one night, it was a bit colder outside — I felt the cold more now that I was losing weight. Joe got all choked up and hugged me but soon carried me back to the soft palette out on the patio and slid the door closed.

During the next week, Joe paid particular attention to the food he gave me. It was always full of gravy which I like so much but he noticed that half a portion from the can was barely touched. I still drank water and still enjoyed sleeping under the rose bushes during the day.

One Sunday in September Joe noticed how dirty my coat was and how stiff I seemed to be. He decided to give me a warm bath. I’d had a couple during the summer which I complained about but knew that I couldn't keep myself clean anymore.

Joe had worked out a method in the tub. He ran a slow quiet stream of warm water and worked the baby shampoo into my fur, holding me under the water to rinse it off. During this bath I no longer had any strength to resist. After just one low deeply felt moan, I let Joe wash me and get it over with. He realized that I’d lost even more body mass and had trouble even standing in the tub. I loved the drying out part with the soft towels and when I was mostly fluffy, Joe spread a warm towel on his bed and let me stay with him there.

Over the summer, Joe had spoken with his lady friends and other people about end of life issues with their pets. These folks had all had pets for many years. Joe's question was direct "When did you decide it was time to put them down?"

To a person, these folks all said, "You will know when it's time."

Still Joe was uncertain. I had good days and still gave some head butts when I was up to it but I also couldn't hide the fact that my overall health was going down hill fast.

We sat on the bed for hours after my Sunday bath and Joe cuddled me a bit. He couldn't get over though that he’d just given me a warm bath and still my fur wasn't the bright white that it always was and that the smell of fur wasn't pleasant.

When one of the nurses that Joe knows telephoned him that night, I was still on the towel on the bed and could listen. That was the first time I heard Joe say what I knew for the past two months, "Buddy's dying."

He put me on my soft palette outside when it was time to go to bed.

Next day, I was laying near the sliding door when Joe got up to make his coffee. He let me in and I watched him putter about making breakfast and packing a lunch. He then left plenty of food and fresh water for me on the patio. Freddie, too, was never far from my side anymore. Joe went to work and Fred and I watched the birds at the recently filled feeder. To be continued.

Time to Say Goodbye

I spent the day sleeping but my sleepiness was far beyond my cat naps of the past. My kidneys had stopped functioning. The poison was not being filtered out and therefore was causing my constant drowsiness and lethargy.

As the day went on, thoughts of all the fun I’d had with Joe kept returning to me. I suddenly had a silly desire to see the front yard again. I knew that if I was out there, I would be able to watch the kids coming home from El Gabilan School in one direction and the skateboarders coming home from North High in the other. I no longer cared if dogs were being walked. What could they possibly do to me in this state?

So through the hole in the fence that Joe cut out for me years ago when my back first failed me, I went.

I looked over at Old Wes’ yard. His relatives had blocked up my passage under his fence. I suppose to keep me out of his backyard. It was a place I never went anymore anyway as Wes was housebound now. I slowly made my way past the large roses on the side of the house and hid behind the rosemary shrub and rested.

Freddie was next to me the entire time which made me feel safer. How many times had I crossed Chaparral Street to smell the car tires on the other side? It had been months since I even made it to the curb.

I moved a bit further out onto the dried up grass. No rain. No lawn.

I was so tired of being stiff and sore — and now this big effort to go out front had exhausted me. I closed my eyes and prayed Joe would be home soon.

When his truck pulled up in the driveway an hour or so later, Freddie came running to him, obviously distressed at my odd behavior.

Joe hurried over to me, surprised to find me in this unlikely spot. He lifted me up. His arms were always a safe place to be and I tried to purr. He brought me inside and noticed how weak I was. He set me in front of the food dish and I couldn't eat. He moved the water bowl over to me but I couldn't drink. He brought my palette into the living room and placed it on the couch, lifted me up and let me rest inside the box on top of the soft pillow and blankets.

Freddie sat next to the box on the couch and Joe sat on the other side. No one said anything.

Then, Joe got up to find his phone. He picked it up and sat across the room from us. It was Monday. So he knew the lady vet wouldn't be there. He looked for the number of the Romie Lane Animal Hospital which was open in the evening and called it. When the lady answered the phone, he asked about euthanizing services, but got choked up and just hung up.

The three of us stared, each at the other, and me barely able to lift my head. After a time, I thought I had rallied a bit and decided to go sit on Joe's lap. But as I got to the edge of the couch near the end table, my legs failed me and I fell on the floor between the two and, for the first time, cried out in pain. Joe rushed over and pulled me out from under the table and put me back in the box.

Joe picked up the phone again and made an appointment for that evening. He then went into the bathroom and I heard him pulling out tissues and blowing his nose and uttering little moans. I wanted to say it was going to be fine. I’d lived a nice long, comfortable, useful and loving life and all things have to end.

Freddie wasn't sure what to do or how to help me and I felt for him. He and I were a couple of deuces, and had so much fun together. And, yes, sometimes deuces are wild and can trump a trick, but not this time.

Joe came back into the living room and called one of his nurse friends.

"It's time," I heard him say in slow and broken tones. She was on her way to drive us to the vet.

Joe picked me up and I leaned against his chest and sighed and we sat together for about twenty minutes until she arrived.

She knocked on the door and came in. I opened my eyes at the sound of her voice. She had cared for me many times over the years when Joe was gone and always made a fuss over me when she visited. I have always enjoyed women. She, too, spoke in soft and soothing tones to me and to Joe and to Freddie.

Joe laid me down in the box again and I fell asleep.

The next thing I knew we were driving down Main Street and the lights were colorful and flashing. I lifted my head up and looked at the store fronts and at Joe's face but all was beginning to blur and now, just like at my birth, I had to judge the world seeing only light and dark.

The box I was in was sitting securely on Joe's lap and then it was being carried into a waiting area and then it was soon escorted into an examining room. If strangers peered inside, I failed to notice or care. The dark was now past and the future was light.

Joe and his friend were busy filling out papers and speaking with the staff.

Dr. Ponder came into the room and said, "Let me give him something to relax."

Joe touched my head and said "goodbye" and that was a beautiful way to go.

---

Note from Joe:

I decided to bury Buddy in my rose garden. There was a spot that was empty and it was often a place where he warmed himself in the morning sunlight. There was something very old fashioned about this gesture that comforted me. In a sense, I felt what so many people in the past must have felt when they lost a loved one, that they would never really be without him if they buried him near by, either in the local cemetery or in an uncultivated pasture or in a backyard.

We brought Buddy home to the place he’d wandered into, enticed by the smell of roast chicken on that sunny Sunday afternoon thirteen years ago.

My friend had contributed a mostly-already-consumed bottle of The Glenlivet. She called our other nurse friend and said "Come over to Joe's. We had to put Buddy down."

So the three of us toasted and drank (the latter mostly me) to Buddy's long and happy life and we stayed up to around midnight remembering this wonderful stray cat with a stub for a tail and a personality that made many in the human race seem pale.

They said good night and I got a few hours of sleep.

I was up at five and out in the garden clearing his final spot with Freddie by my side. I wanted to make certain that no future resident of this house and yard would ever disturb Buddy's resting place which meant I had to dig a very deep hole. So out in that foggy morning, I dug a grave both wide and deep with tired muscles, a runny nose and a broken heart.

I’d cut up my cotton dress shirts and wrapped up Buddy's now stiff body like an Egyptian mummy. I’d looked at the corpse before starting but it was just a discarded body, a beat up old container. The essence of what once was Buddy had departed.

Not sure why now, but at the time I didn't want to bury with him any plastic buttons. So with a large pair of fabric shears, I cut off the front and cuffs of the shirts. He was wrapped in about six of them. I put a piece of cardboard on the bottom of the hole, placed his body on it and then covered that with another piece of cardboard. I slowly filled the hole in and suddenly became conscious of Freddie standing next to me watching me. He stood attentively for a moment and then used his front paws to move some dirt into the hole. Of course this made me laugh and feel better.

A rose bush given to me last spring had remained in a pot all summer and this occasion was the perfect time to plant it. So with the grave only half filled, I pulled the bush out of its pot, spread its roots about and then carefully filled the rest of the hole with some fresh dirt.

I dragged the hose over to the hole — remember it hadn't rained in Salinas in months — and gave the new bush a good hearty drink and flooded the spot. When that drained out, I filled it up again.

Happy to have its tangled, pot-bound roots in the ground, within a week the bush — a medium-sized red climber called "Dublin Bay" — set several buds and by October was blooming quite freely.

Follow Joe Truskot on Twitter @truskot_salnews and like him on Facebook.

On Thursday evening, Nov. 5, while I was getting my mail, a tiny black cat with white whiskers, vest and paws charged into my living room and asked for supper. He ate what seemed to be half his body weight while Freddie and I watched. Then he drank uninterrupted from the water bowl for about 3 minutes. He looked over at us and he seemed to have no interest in going back outside. His discovery of the kitty toy basket, untouched for years, sealed the situation. We spent the rest of the evening laughing at this little guy's enormous capacity to entertain. He fit perfectly in my left hand and has one loud purr.

As he was born wearing a tuxedo, we decided that "Leopoldo" would be an appropriate name — in honor of the great conductor Leopold Stokowski. We’re not certain how long he’d been out on his own but his ribs were sticking out and his focus was definitely on the food. He's got ‘Good ‘n’ Plenty’ pads on the bottom of his feet — an assortment of black, pink and white.

Perhaps he wandered away or was evicted from a litter or perhaps someone dropped him at my door like Moses in his basket. He's going to make a trip to the vet soon to determine whether he has a microchip. I’ve felt for one but haven't noticed anything yet. Until he gets bigger, he's going to stay inside and make me laugh. I limit it to "me" because I don't think Freddie was ready for what hit him. And I mean that literally. Leopoldo is everywhere at once. Fred hisses and swats at him, without malice and apparently without results. The little guy eagerly runs toward him, leaps into the air — four paws outstretched — and lands on his back, only to take off around the couch before Freddie knows what knocked him over. Freddie's at least seven times his size.

The split leaf philodendron has suffered a bit but I must admit its bottom leaves were never greatly admired. I’ve tripped over a few carelessly abandoned stuffed mice, rubber balls, and other rattling toys while wandering around in the dark. But I've discovered that there are few things more fun than a 12-week old kitten — and now knowing that all cats are the same and yet each one is different.

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