mandy

Page Seven

sehnen posted on Jun 06, 2008 | views: 87 | Tags: aschlöcher seid verflucht^x

^{(from the blogs; originally in german)}

friday 6 june 2008…    greenfield

Time to talk about Mandy today, another of the fourteen who were stolen from me. He came to us in late June of 1995, thirteen years ago, and was a year or two old already. He appeared in our neighborhood, on the canal – clean, very friendly, already neutered – and never left it again, until he left it with me. Clearly such a friendly and neutered cat was not a humanless stray, but belonged to someone. I advertised for two or three weeks in the paper and on the radio, but no one ever claimed him. He stayed a part of our family from then until he was stolen on 12 March 2008 — nearly thirteen years. The canal in turners falls, I would soon learn, was a place that some people sometimes used to dump animals they didn’t want anymore, and this seems to be what happened to Mandy.

Though I’ve had a great many cats in my life, I’ve never known another one who carried friendliness to the dizzy heights that Mandy did. He loved all living things, and in all my years with him I saw him be mean to only one animal, a cat who belonged to my mother. And she was the most inoffensive thing going, so I don’t know why he picked on her. All else Mandy loved. When he was “hunting,” he would park a few feet away from his prey, fix them with what for him was a mean look, and talk, talk a sound in his throat likea purr but with the high pitch of a meow. I constantly remonstrated him to the effect that if he really wanted to catch something, he needed to shut up. Sitting there talking away at the prey was a bad strategy, I told him, unless he planned on talking them to death.

He thought nothing of walking up to strange animals and people, rubbing against them, and talking a blue streak. Huge dogs, skunks, woodchucks, whatever. I firmly believe he wouldn’t have hesitated to walk up to a bloody wolf and attempt to rub against it. When animals reacted meanly to Mandy’s advances, he would dash away making little cries in his throat, wearing a confused expression as if to say: what the hell was that all about? His extreme friendliness meant I always had to be wary of people stealing him. Many people over the years asked me if they could have him. More than once I caught children walking away down a street with Mandy in their arms, and I would have to go after them. What are you doing with that cat, I’d say. I’m takin’ him home. He likes me. To which I’d sourly reply: he likes everybody. but he’s my cat and you can’t take him. I wonder how many new grey hairs I got worrying about people stealing him.

His face in this picture shows the precise way Mandy always greeted the world: full-on, fearless, and honestly; eager to make a new friend or have a new adventure. Every furred animal in the house — dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea pigs — was happy to lie down and have a cuddle with Mandy, to be groomed by him, to receive the generosity of his generous love.

And yes, he talked. Mandy was driven to communicate. Talk, talk. Everybody who ever knew him commented both on his friendliness and his talking. They referred to him as the Talker. This drive for communication is something he and I had in common, for I am also an inveterate communicator. People who have little to say bore me real fast. But as much as Mandy liked to talk, he also liked to be talked to. All the talking I did around the house with my animals over the years was appreciated by all the animals, and certainly by Mandy too. Often he answered me.

So how did he get a girl’s name. When he first arrived, I thought he was a female. His hair in his nether regions was thick and fluffy. It was difficult to see what was going on back there without finger-probing, which on my first examination I didn’t feel like doing. I thought he was a she, and because he looked so much like my cat Bandit who had died earlier that year, I wanted him to have a name that rhymed with Bandy. Result: Mandy. After a few months, when Mandy failed to come into heat several times, I did the finger-probing and found the evidence of a neutered male. But he had his name by then, and we were all used to it, so it stayed.

Update 16 June 2009: A year since I wrote this post. Is he still alive? The animal “shelter” was very secretive about where Mandy and Judah had gone. They had been placed in a foster home, but again, I was not allowed to know where that home was or to visit. I was given a deadline of May 14 last year to reclaim them, and since I was not able to find a place other than a rented room by then, they were adopted and swallowed up. Never any visits, never any small bit of comfort for my pain. Do I have to say that I despise that animal “shelter”? They had murdered 3 of my cats on March 24 last year, just two weeks into their “foster care.”

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