I know most of you didn’t know Mister. And some probably don’t want to or care, but this is one amazing cat. Feline, although if he were human, I’d have called him cat anyway. This cat had long since used up 9 lives.
He was mostly black, with some white spots here and there and of average size, for your common domestic house cat. The most distinguishing features were that he had an over bite, a gimp and a personality that even my brother Jim couldn’t make up. Yup! Let me explain.
Mister was acquired by Angie and Stacey before I came into their lives. Sometime, shortly after he came around, he was run over by a car (Don’t laugh, by the end your gonna think Ray Willie Hubbard wrote this). At least that is what Angie surmised. He crawled home dragging his hind quarters. She took him to the vet and found that he had a broken femur (leg bone) and pelvis. I’m sure he got hit because he must of been standing in the middle of the road hissing at the car and refusing to move, as was his style. At the time they didn’t have the money for complete surgical repair. So the vet patched him up with a pin in the femur and skepticism that he would survive. Angie and Stacey carried him back and forth from the litter box and bed, where he spent the next 3 months. Every since then, he walked with a gimp gait that even Hollywood couldn’t have imagined (think Walter Brennan). And every since, he had unique litter box habits. He pooped and peed in the box, missing most of the time, and then pawed the litter to the out side of the box making one hell of a mess in the process.
The over bite was congenital, meaning he was born that way. At the last vet visit, the vet who was new to Mister, he commented that he had never seen, heard of, or read about a cat with an overbite. There was a good 1/4″ gap between the upper and lower teeth from front to back.
Mister had traveled quite a bit in his life. He basically lived with Stacey all his life. Every time she moved, Mister went on a walk-about. It usually would happen a few weeks after moving in to a new place. Its not that he would get lost, because before he left, he would go in and out and come home on a regular basis. He would be gone for as long as 10 weeks and as far away as several miles across town. He had been returned by individuals, vets and he had come home on his own. When individuals had returned him, it was usually discovered that he had been living with them as if they were his family.
Occasionally, Angie and I would cat-sit Mister. He would view these cat-sit trips the same as a move and would take off on a walk-about. Once, after we had let him out, he was gone for 3 weeks and we had written him off to the coyotes. But one day, Angie heard a low growl in the spruce trees behind the house and there he was, scruffy, skinny and attitude intact. After that, we did not let him out.
So, Mister found that the downstairs bathroom had a hole in the sheet rock ceiling where I had done some plumbing repair. He decided that that was the equivalent to taking off on a walk-about. Somehow, gimp and all, he’d crawl up in the crawl space (pun intended) between the basement and first floor and hang out. The opening was 4.5 feet above the nearest flat surface from which to stage a launch. The 1st time it happened, it took us a couple of days to find him. We knew he must still be around because he was regularly making a mess of the cat box and eating his food.
Mister was deaf. As a door nail. Worse than me, even. When he meowed, it was like a banshee (whatever the heck that is) screaming in eternal agony. It was as if he was trying real hard to hear himself. Usually, he would cry when he got home sick or when he thought we were ignoring him. And usually after midnight. Makes me wonder how he survived the coyotes. He also liked heights. For some reason, he liked to sleep, nap, hang out on the top of a book case or a fireplace mantle. Yeah well, those pictures or whatever were not in his way, he’d just push them off onto the floor for fun. When Mister would come over, Angie would go around clearing the top surfaces for him so he wouldn’t break picture frames and what not.
Mister was the kind of cat that would rub up your leg for affection and then hiss, spit and scratch you in the same moment. He would not drink water out of a bowl. Only from a dripping faucet or the toilet. After satisfying his thirst, he would bat at the water drops as if they were a toy on a string. Spreading an otherwise unexplained puddle of water all over the bathroom or kitchen floor. Mister was most sociable when someone was in the bathroom. Even when he wasn’t thirsty, he would come to the bathroom and bat water, for instance, while you were brushing your teeth or washing your hands.
His next to last adventure involved a move to Independence, Mo. They’d been there for a few months and low and behold, Mister turned up missing. Stacey and Jon put a sign in the yard about their missing cat and several weeks later a young guy pulled up and asked if their cat had a gimp, an overbite and an attitude. Yup. Well, it seems that Mister had found the Sonic, about 2 blocks away from their house. This young man was at Sonic and Mister just jumped in his car through an open window. His Mom was a cat person so he called her and told her what had happened and she agreed to take the cat. She lived in Blue Springs, Mo. about 20 miles away. They said that Mister had acted as if getting in the car and moving in with the mom was the most natural thing for a cat to do.
Like I said. An attitude. Mister was part cat, part raccoon and part dog.
When Mister lost almost all of his sight, Stacey fitted him with a collar and would let him out in the back yard on a chain tether. Like one would use for a dog. Mister’s last skill was that of a Houdini-like performance in escaping from bondage. His last walk-about ended in his demise and he was found in a neighbor’s yard, dead. No cars involved. Mister was probably 18 years old cumulative, because that was spread over 9 lives.
Respectfully submitted by your grumpy Uncle Dave.