I know it's considered almost blasphemous to say on this site, but I've never been a cat person. For one thing, they're not dogs. To paraphrase someone I don't know, dog’s only flaw is that they don't live long enough.
But more than that, I'm allergic to cats. I can walk into a house that has a cat and if it's a clean house, I'll be ok but get just a bit stuffy. If that cat jumps in my lap and I pet him (and I will pet him) I'll spend the rest of the night with swollen eyes, hugging a box of Kleenex and sneezing like mad.
So when my wife announced back in ‘12 that we were taking in the cat that she used to share with her ex, I was not pleased. I would have flat out said absolutely not but this was a special cat. He had the cat equivalent of Down's syndrome, and my wife's ex left him to her sister to take care of. The sister, classy as always, decided a year later that the cat was just too much trouble, so she was just going to toss him outside and let him fend for himself.
I was naturally appalled by this so I compromised with Mrs BB: we’ll take the cat in as a foster until we can find him another permanent home with loving parents.
When my wife's ex brought the cat to us, I realized it would be a tall order. He was a wreck. He couldn't clean himself- just couldn't figure out how to do it- so his hair was matted and mangy and his eyes were weepy with discharge. His bones were somewhat deformed and he could barely walk. When he did walk, he'd get stuck in the carpet because he couldn't retract his claws.
And he was skittish and shy and didn't seem to want to have much to do with humans, so the idea of rehabilitating him seemed like an insurmountable task.
For the first couple of weeks we had him, he hid behind the TV/entertainment center and only came out to eat and (if it was a good day) use the litter box. He'd let Mrs BB pet him and love on him for a bit, then retreat back to his hiding spot. He was reclusive and I was ok with that because as long as he stayed in his little corner of the room I only sneezed a couple times a day. I wasn’t happy (to say the least) about him relieving himself in that corner by the TV, but I understood he was scared, so I gritted my teeth, cleaned the carpet a few times a day, and accepted that this was a special cat.
Then one day I fell ill with the flu. My wife made me a bed on the living room floor before she went to work, making sure plenty of fluids and medicines were within arms reach for me. I was dozing in and out, and each time I semi-woke up, Ricky had moved a little further from his corner.
Snooooze… Here's Ricky right beneath the TV.
Snooze…. Here's Ricky between the TV and the mattress on the floor…..
Snoooooze, here's Ricky with the upper part of his body on the mattress…..
Snoooooze, what the…!!!???? Why is Ricky laying here next me?
A-choo!
He crawled up on my chest that night, stared into my eyes, and “purred” at me. I put that in quotation marks because, like everything Ricky did, it wasn’t really a purr, it was just a strange sound coming from his throat.
From that day on, Ricky was constantly attached to me. It was difficult because I didn’t want to love the little guy but how could I not? I was still allergic, so every lovefest we had set my eyes and nose a’blazing, and he insisted on having at least two lovefests a day. I bought pet wipes in bulk so I could clean Ricky since he couldn’t clean himself,and I brushed him every day, sometimes a few times a day. I even got him to trust the litter box.
We lived in a rather large house when we took him in, and the haul from the litter box, or to where we kept his food and water, was a 45 minute trek for him. Tap, tap, tap, his paws would sound on the floor, then lie down, catch his breath. Then tap, tap, tap, lie down, catch his breath. And then he’d finally get make the journey from his litter box to the couch in 45 minutes.
After a few months, it took him seconds.
I remember the night it took him ten minutes to get from his litter box in the hallway to the couch. “Babe!” I exclaimed to my wife, “Ricky cleared the fifteen minute mark!”
And so it went. Ricky made small but progressive steps, and we delighted in all of it. Pretty soon he was strolling through the house like a champ; not necessarily swiftly like you’d expect from a cat, but steadily and with purpose, and with no need to take a break.
One day Ricky ran when he heard his food being scooped up into his dish. That little fucker RAN! It was a weird, sideways, kinda drunken run, but he ran nonetheless. Just another mark of his progress. Mrs BB was out of town when we crossed that milestone so I recorded it for her. We were both so excited, like parents of a child who had just taken his first step.
He continued to make progress. He used his litter box regularly, although he’d use it, get halfway down the hall, then make a pathetic attempt to cover his waste. Ten feet away from the litter box, Ricky would stop, give one of his mangled purrs, then start kicking his hind legs behind him as though he was doing something important.
Despite my allergies, I fell head over heels in love with this cat. At night he’d crawl up on my chest (I could write a novel about how long it took him to figure out how to get up on the couch) and purr as I wiped him down with wipes and loved on him. He’d rest his head on my chest while I did that, then sporadically lift his head to look into my eyes. But, still, his coordination was off, so his head would sway back and forth, and it was like having a little drunk cat on my belly, swaying back and forth, declaring “I love you. I really, really love you.”
One day back in ‘14, I was on the phone while Ricky was using his litter box, and the person I was talking to was going on about something and I interrupted: “Ricky’s covering his poop! In the litter box! He’s actually doing it right!” I beamed with pride the rest of the day.
He almost turned into a halfway real cat, all persnickety and such. But not quite, and my admiration for him grew in leaps and bounds.