In 1990, I was living in cheap ‘student’ apartments in Tuscaloosa, Alabama called Landmark Apartments. I was in grad school. Landmark didn’t allow pets, but that didn’t stop those people who had pets–the maintenance men turned a blind eye, and most of the management was
also students who didn’t care.
In the apartment directly across from mine were three girls. Stacy, Lindle, and the other one whose name I don’t remember had two adult male cats, a rabbit, a baby raccoon and a small dog. All in direct violation of the ‘no-pets’ policy.
The maintenance guys played with them.
Also among the menagerie of animals in the area were two “community cats” that didn’t have names (or, more appropriately, had many names). One was a female who was incredibly friendly and good-natured, and the other was a rangy Tom who was also quite friendly, but a little less trusting than the female. They had obviously both been someone’s pet that had been abandoned; Scruffy, as I called the male, would wait for your door to open, then he’d barge in uninvited, run straight for your kitchen, stand at the refrigerator, and meow. Clearly, he knew how the world worked. If the tuna wasn’t forthcoming, Scruffy had things to do and places to be. He didn’t hang around long and
demanded to be let out again.
The female turned up pregnant, and so it became natural that the girls across the way dubbed her “Mama-Kitty.” I think everyone in our corner of the complex was feeding
Mama-Kitty and Scruffy.
On March 10, 1990, Mama-Kitty went into labor. Stacy and Lindle had set up a cardboard box in the breezeway between our apartments complete with an old towel. Mama-Kitty seemed to instinctively know what it was for, so she went into there to have her kittens. I was gone and so were Stacy and Lindle, but my mother and her friend Peggy were at my apartment at the right time that day and thus “presided” over the births. The kittens were white, like Mama-Kitty, but with yellow-tabby splotches, like Scruffy.
Their parentage was pretty obvious. 🙂
From the start, Mama-Kitty was a good mother. She protected the four tiny kittens fiercely, and it was only when a neighbor’s dog started to harass her that Stacy and Lindle decided that they could not leave Mama-Kitty outside with the newborn kittens. In less than six hours, they went from living in the open to being in the same box,
but in Stacy’s bedroom.
Over the next couple of weeks, we watched them snuffle around blindly inside the confines of their box. Mama-Kitty knew where her bread was buttered and didn’t mind too terribly much when we handled the kittens. They were still blind and deaf, but when you picked them up, they’d spit in that adorable way that kittens have, already trying to be fierce, but only succeeding
in being unutterably cute.
Because of the menagerie in the girls’ apartment, they had fleas something awful, and they infested the kittens. My mother, me, Stacy and Lindle each took a kitten, whose eyes had just opened, sprayed some flea spray into a washcloth, and gently held the kitten and rubbed it with the washcloth. Although scared at first, the kittens got the idea immediately that getting rid of the fleas had been a good thing. Mine leaned back into my hands on his back, streeeeeetched his forepaws out over his head, closed his eyes,
and purred contentedly.
I don’t know for certain if Gremlin was the kitten that I held that day,
but I like to think it was.
Another month goes by. The girls have gotten rid of the rabbit, the dog, and the raccoon and have arranged for Mama-Kitty to have a good home on their parents’ farm (Stacy and Lindle were sisters). That left the matter of 6-week-old kittens. All four had been promised to good homes, two of them in the complex and one to a man Stacy knew. The kittens were walking in that lurchy, uncertain way they have, and were getting bolder and starting
to explore Stacy’s bedroom.
One afternoon, Stacy knocked on my door holding a kitten. “I have a problem,” she said. “Mr.
She held him at eye height.
Well, duh. Here’s a very pretty girl holding an adorable 6-week-old kitten and smiling at me. What am I gonna say? No? No. 🙂 Of course I said I’d take the little guy!
What a sucker.
The Kitten (as I called him) and I established the ground rules for our entire time together in that first month. Mama-Kitty had not really shown him the ropes because there just hadn’t been time. I was his entire world. He stayed within about three feet of me at all times. His litterbox was on the carpet behind my chair (this was a huge mistake, and I know this, now). He wasn’t good at litter, and I should have done something, but I was a novice cat-owner at the time, so I didn’t know what to do. I just know that he never did really learn to cover. He had the right idea–he’d scratch…the floor, the walls…random objects near the
box…just…not…the litter. 🙂
He didn’t really know he could jump or climb, so when he wanted up in my chair with me, he’d stand on my shoe and I’d raise my leg perpendicular (Playing Elevator, I called it), and he’d just walk up my leg into my lap. He’d lie in my lap for hours on his back, little pink feet curled up in the epitome of “relaxed.”
His purr was loud even then.
One morning I awoke in bed to the oddest sensation. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was strange. When I finally figured it out, I thought it was so cute. The Kitten (he still didn’t have a name) was nursing on my earlobe and kneading my jaw just below the earlobe (I had and still have a beard, so it must have felt like fur). He was SO content, I hated to disturb him, but I had to get up. It never occurred to me even once that
a cat shouldn’t sleep in the bed.
He continued to thrive, but still didn’t have a name. It wasn’t until my mother’s friend Peggy was playing with him one afternoon and he was getting rough that he acquired a name that stuck. She said, “He bites HARD! What did you do, feed him after midnight? He’s like a gremlin.”
(Or words to that effect. 🙂
It was like a ray of light came down and hit us all. Gremlin was his name from that moment forward. And he lived up to his name
on so many, many occasions…. 🙂
So it was that my forever cat was born under what, for him, were the best circumstances he could possibly have imagined, with people who loved animals surrounding him from the moment he entered the world.
And I cannot imagine having gone through those years without him in them.
I miss him so much sometimes.
You're in my heart forever,
| Gremlin |
| 5, Aug 2003 |
| Gary |