The Reports of Her Death Were Greatly Exaggerated

The title of course is, of course, a derivative of a quotation from Mark Twain. He was a cat lover, too. Here is another quotation from him:

I simply can't resist a cat, particularly a purring one. They are the cleanest, cunningest, and most intelligent things I know, outside of the girl you love, of course.
- quoted in Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field, Fisher


Now, here is a quotation by yours truly from a blog entry here on Nov 12 of last year:

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.

Well, Maggie turned out not to be so stupid after all. This week, Cana saw a poster on a pole in our neighborhood with what she thought, and I thought maybe, was Maggie's picture on it as lost. But teh poster had not been put up by us, but by someone else in the neighborhood. And the cat's her name was Sam. Well, I took the plunge and called the number on the poster, and, to make a long and very funny story short, yes it was Maggie and her new owners live about 5 houses down. Maggie/Sam had scratched on their door back in November, and they eventually let her in (they have one other cat and apparently they don't bug each other), got her shots, put a collar on her and love her like crazy. I assured her new owner that I thought Maggie/Sam would be much happier there than coming home to be terrorized by would be-assassins named Mel and Danger. So Maggie/Sam has found her own little heaven on earth, and we are all happy, happy, happy. The vet told her new owner that she was about three years old---she actually is seven years old, so I guess we did an okay job keeping her young. Gil, the new owner, also asked if she had had kittens, since she had so much loose flab on her tummy...no, she just was chubby, apparently losing some of that chub in her hunt for a new home. Maggie/Sam had showed up back at Gil's house the day after she had put up the posters, so evidently Sam/Maggie considers her new home her real home.
Anyway, it is Resurrection season, and even though she never died physically, we pretty much thought she had, so it has been an Easter morning around here. How about that!