The love and loss of kitties

I have been meaning to show you Mel. Here he is, now 5-6 months old. I took this tonight. This is a usual pose for him. He loves me like no cat I have ever had. He has a very quiet soul- and often just sits and looks at me and reminds me of an owl. Remember Mel is named for Mel Torme to whom we were listening the day we got him (and besides he has a tuxedo look to his gorgeous fur), and was the kitty who was in danger of euthanasia when Caleb and I went to the shelter back in August. Caleb and his dad wanted to name him Miles Davis instead, because Mel is one cool cat. Danger is our other cat, is physically a little smaller and younger, and his name says it all. I call him Power Ranger Danger...he thinks he is much larger than he is. He and Mel do play together, but where Danger is hardly ever content to gaze, Mel likes to often. He runs in and jumps on me and purrs in the morning. If I am gone more than an hour, he runs to greets me when I come in the door. Mel has a substantial meow; Danger has a squeak which we think is funny, since he lives so large.

So that is the pleasure. The loss is this: last Tuesday, when I brought the boy kitties home from getting their shots at the vet, I had intended to take Maggie, our older female, immediately to get hers. But when we returned, alas, Maggie was gone. We could not and cannot find her. She was healthy, no illness, except manic depression brought on by two additional felines in the house. We think she had developed wrinkles around her eyebrows (anger lines) since the boys came to live with us. She never adjusted. We didn't know what to do...Mel, she would tolerate, but Danger was just a huge pain to her. So I guess she just got fed up and walked away sneaking outside while I was getting the young ones in the carrier to go to the vet. She has not been an outdoor kitty, but the kittens had gotten her reflexes in good shape over the last couple of months, since she always had to be watching her backside, literally, since Danger liked to play with her tail. Where Danger thinks of himself as much bigger than he is, Maggie had begun thinking herself much smaller than SHE is. She had started trying to get up on my desk, for example, even though she is gargantuan and would often knock off my pictures and papers, since she saw the boys doing it. She still got a lot of love, believe me.

We keep thinking she will return, though Philip is being rather matter of fact about how she has gotten hit by a car and crawled up someplace and died (aren't former spouses kind...I make him promise not to share that with Cana but I know she has thought of that too.) I prefer to think she went to a chubby kitty spa to lose the 10 or so extra pounds, or that, as Cana said, Prince has called to her in a special kitty voice only they can hear and told her of a fair land where there are no menacing would-be assassin small cats to make a mature cat miserable; a place where there is salmon every day and where milk doesn't give one indigestion; and a place where there is always sun coming through the windows and saintly hands to scratch that favorite spot. We can hope. I just hope her frown lines have gone away and that although we knew she wasn't the brightest kitty God ever made (yes, I have called her stupid) she is/was quite a nice soft cat who was a shelter kitty too. We'll see.