Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Cats of Thornwood

Cats of Thornwood

A few years after we settled in Palo Alto… Susanne, a friend of Orit, told us that a friend of hers had a cat who just gave birth to a litter of kitties and offered us one… To our surprise she brought two cats asking us to keep one for a couple of days… because she was going away for the week-end… but clearly she had forgotten about the kitty because she showed up two weeks later to pick up “her” cat… by then the little kitties were so happy together that we refused to give her one… We then named the kitties Tofu and Kudzu and set up a basket for them to sleep in our garage…

Even though they were brothers the kitties developed their own personalities… they both loved to cuddle with the kids in front of television… Kudzu loved rubbing his head under whoever’s hand… as if to say rub my head… I love it when you do that… outdoors Kudzu would go and find a leaf that looked like a hockey stick put it in his mouth and run with it as fast as he could… he had disappeared for a while… maybe he went to Canada and played hockey… or maybe he went to Hollywood and act in the movies… Gal thought she saw him on UCLA campus…
Tofu on the other hand was into soccer… we had an apple tree in our back yard and when spring came and some small apples fell from the tree Tofu was there playing with the apples like a soccer player…

One day a couple of years later… one of my neighbors… three houses down… informed me that Kudzu showed up in his doorstep… and they kinda adopted him… I saw Kudzu sporadically but he always escaped when I called him… Until I was informed that Kudzu had a lump growing in the back of his head… so I took him to the Vet… we found out that he had a tumor growing… without any pain said the Vet… but if it grows again the cat will have lots of pain… and should be put to sleep…
Kudzu lived for a few months… with the same routine… living at the neighbor’s… then one day I found Kudzu in the basket… which was there since they were baby kitties… at first I thought it was Tofu and I said “Tofu what are you doing in the basket…“ Kudzu looked up at me and meeawd to me… I then saw that his tumor grew so much that it was hurting him… He had simply come home to die… we took him to the Vet… and buried him in our back yard… and even though he was covered with a cloth… Tofu was there …and stayed close by for days… It looked like he had lost the spark of life…

Then Sharon brought home a black kitty… which we called Calvin… he was a very dynamic little kitty… always jumping on Tofu as if to say…come on bro… let’s play… and slowly Tofu found his spark for life again…

A friend of Sharon, Jenny W had received a kitty for her birthday… but her mother refused it… so I was asked to keep it… I accepted on condition that Sharon takes responsibility for it… she was called Kimmy by Mrs. Williams… our next door neighbor and animal lover…
It turned out that Kimmy fell in love with Paddington a big cat living one house down from the Williams’… but Calvin too was in love with Kimmy… and periodically he got into fights with Paddington… some of these fights were very rough and I had to take Calvin to the Vet for antibiotic shots…

Tofu was loosing weight so we brought him to the Vet and found out that he had Thyroid… and needed to take a pill every day… Luckily Mrs. Williams volunteered to do it… We called various Pharmacies to compare prices and found one… so I brought the prescription… They entered the data in their computer…
First name Tofu
Last name Adam
Sex Male
Date of birth Cat
I told the pharmacist… Cats have nine lives… which one do you want…

Tofu lived a few more years… then on a Xmas day Gal found Tofu dead in the garage… so we buried him next to his brother Kudzu…

No comments: