For Feline Friday, all you have to do is post a picture,
drawing, cartoon, or video of a cat.
This week, we’re going way back to my very first cat,
Sassy. My parents had a cat,
Butterscotch, when I was born, but around the time I was nine years old, I
started reading the Mandie books by Lois Gladys Leppard. I was obsessed with them. The main character had a white kitten named
Snowball, and I decided I also needed a white kitten to name Snowball. That’s when the begging for a kitten began.
My younger sister, Gabby, not to be outdone, decided that
she also needed a kitten and that she wanted hers to be a Siamese kitten.
We begged incessantly.
Finally, one night, we were told to come into the kitchen
because Mom’s friend, Pam, had brought a surprise for us. It was a pet carrier, with two tiny little
kittens (they each weighed 2.2 pounds) in it.
Unbeknownst to us, our parents had decided to let us have our kittens,
but weren’t about to take us to an animal shelter, knowing we’d beg for ALL of
the kittens. So, they put the word out
that they were looking for two kittens.
Pam got the two kittens from someone’s neighbor, and they were in pretty
rough shape; malnourished, covered in fleas, etc. But to us, they were perfect.
One of the kittens was in the front of the pet carrier,
hissing at everyone, and the other one was cowering behind the one doing all of
the hissing.
Gabby immediately announced that she wanted the
hisser. I wanted the one who was
cowering.
Gabby immediately named her kitten Koko. I deliberated for almost two full days before
naming mine Sassy.
Koko was the adventurous one, always getting into
everything. By the time they were a few
years old, Sassy was very calm and loved chilling out and being brushed.
This was around the time that my parents decided to get
birds, and we ultimately ended up with eight parakeets (that’s another story
for another time).
The difference in Koko and Sassy’s personalities really
showed in their reactions to the birds.
Koko quite literally climbed a wall in an effort to get to the
birds. Sassy could not have cared less
about them. Don’t worry, none of the
birds were harmed to get this picture.
My dad set it up to demonstrate just how lazy (his word, not mine, I
thought Sassy was perfect) he was.
Sassy looked at the birds, but that was pretty much
it. She liked her food prepared and
served in a dish, thank you very much.
Koko and Sassy both lived to be 15 years old and were the
cats that set Gabby and me on our way to being cat ladies. In some ways, Gabby has stuck with choosing
the feisty cat, and I’ve stuck with choosing the scared cat.
Incidentally, over thirty years later, I’ve still never had
a solid white cat, and Gabby has still never had a Siamese cat, though neither
one of us thought Koko and Sassy were anything less than perfect.
