Occam's Razor

There was one vital last step in our relocation and unpacking. It involved getting some new cats. Our last beloved cat Arthur passed away last year. In a way his unfortunate demise was fortuitous for us because we would not have moved until he was gone. It’s cruel to relocate a cat, particularly a sick one.

The opposite is also true. When setting up a new household it’s cruel to get a cat too soon. Once they arrive, a cat will want everything to be where it will always be. For weeks after moving in there were a slowly diminishing set of boxes, as well as lots of cleaning and re-cleaning and rearranging of stuff until things settled in to our satisfaction and a cat’s.

Finally we were ready to drive to an animal shelter, but which one? There aren’t many here in Western Massachusetts, but a clean and well-run one was a good sign. Variety is good too, which is why we ultimately chose Springfield’s Thomas J. O’Connor Animal Shelter over the closer Dakin Animal Shelter in Amherst. There we fell in love with a calico white, black and cinnamon-colored cat named Applesauce, who we quickly renamed Cinnamon. She was found underweight and malnourished on the streets of Springfield and looked more waif than cat.

Cinnamon sensed right away that we were to be her forever people. Our niece Cheryl was visiting at the time. Cinnamon sat patiently on her lap in the backseat on the way home from the shelter; gently purring and looking out the window. Once in her new home, she quickly adopted but spent most of her first few days hiding under our bed. We knew she felt at home. At night as I stumbled into the bathroom she would be there on the heated floor and wrap her torso around me when I sat on the toilet.

One-cat domestic tranquility was not to last for long. My wife wanted a pair of cats. In particularly she wanted Wilma, a small orange female tabby at the shelter. However, Wilma was not yet available; she had to be fixed. We put in our reservation awaiting her recovery and took her home the day before Halloween. For this and her orange fur she was quickly renamed Pumpkin. Within a day of her arrival Pumpkin contracted something that wholly removed the wind from her sails. We took her to the vet, fretted and gave her plenty of attention until she slowly recovered.

This of course was when the two-cat integration started in earnest. Cinnamon hadn’t really established her territory as she was new too and Pumpkin was too sick to give her a hard time anyhow. Once recovered though Pumpkin showed us exactly who she was: trouble with a capital T. Although she had had a litter of her own (as had Cinnamon, who is about two) she was hardly more than a year old. Pumpkin decided that she was still a kitten. Henceforth her mission was to keep us entertained and/or exasperated, with much more of exasperation than entertainment.

Cinnamon is the laid back and generally inoffensive cat. In Pumpkin’s world everything is a toy and everything merits her incessant curiosity. She can be in a corner of the house and in a mad dash ten seconds later be upstairs in another far corner. There is no chill pill for Pumpkin. Relief arrives only with utter exhaustion. Then she will reluctantly find a sleep spot, usually on my wife’s pajamas on the top of our bed. Even while she sleeps this sleek and all-muscle work of nature often twitches. You can see her eyes move under her eyelids as she prepares further adventures in her mind.

Our bedtime dynamics quickly changed with Pumpkin’s health. It was clear that she would be jumping on us all night long and at random intervals, which meant she had to sleep elsewhere. This also meant Cinnamon had to sleep elsewhere. The hard part was figuring out a way to get them both out of our bedroom. We eventually settled on a reward approach: saving a kitty treat for both just before retiring, then scrambling to our bedroom while they ate them, quickly turning off lights and shutting the bedroom door. To register her disapproval Cinnamon started clawing at the carpet under the door and meowing. This eventually caused me to install a flap under the door. The clawing still continues, but now she picks at the flap instead of the carpet.

Cinnamon has quickly porked out. Pumpkin remains a lean and usually roving awesome kitty machine, constantly sticking her nose and claws into places they should not go. The rubber mat under the kitchen sink she treats as her personal scratching post. She eats from Cinnamon’s food dish. She constantly jumps on the dining room table, mostly to hunt for pens that she will brush onto the floor and which will soon end up under furniture. She has knocked over things on the windowsill. She loves loves loves anything to do with flowing water, be it from a faucet or a toilet. I throw her out and shut the bathroom door before shaving otherwise I would never finish. She loves sinks so much she will often take a nap in my wife’s sink in our master bathroom. For better or worse Pumpkin bonded with my wife and liberally uses her legs as a scratching post. We continuously correct her behavior but so far little of it has sunk in. She just looks at us with her playful eyes. It’s not hard to read her thoughts, which endlessly go like this: “play play play”.

Pumpkin is full of joie de vivre, which may be her most endearing aspect. While a total pain in the ass she is at least a cute pain in the ass. She is one hundred percent joyfully alive and will suck every possible microsecond of such joy during her existence. If she can’t find it, she’ll invent something. Usually a wadded up ball of paper will work for a while but a whole plethora of toys scattered across our wood floors somehow is never quite enough to fully scratch that itch.

One joy is stalking her new sister Cinnamon and then pouncing on her. Cinnamon finds her stalking obsession annoying and freakish and spends much of her day trying to stay out of her way. All this simply encourages Pumpkin to find her and engage her, so there are endless numbers of minor scuffles all day long, rarely anything serious and mostly an expression of Pumpkin’s endless supply of nervous energy.

Perhaps in part as a reaction to her freaky sister, Cinnamon usually follows me around all day. She is so often underfoot that I must constantly watch where I step. Going down stairs is challenging because my foot can easily end up where she has placed herself. Generally whenever I move, Cinnamon moves as well right at my heel. In the morning she looks forward to coming upstairs with me and my cup of coffee, and usually settles at the top of the stairs. There she can keep an eye on Pumpkin and at least have some warning if she is going to be stalked. As the larger cat, Cinnamon certainly outweighs her and could probably out-smack her too. She just prefers domestic tranquility.

I try to ignore Pumpkin most of the time, leaving her to annoy my wife instead, who will at least interact with her by frequently yelling and correcting her behavior. Pumpkin and I will become friends in time, but she has to settle down first. She has to stop doing evil things like chewing through my wife’s earphone cords. Pumpkin does like to curl up on a lap so she has a lot of potential as a lap kitty. Cinnamon mostly avoids laps, but she does like attention. Both cats will get on our desk in front of our monitors and settle in as if to say, “Well of course I am far more important than that glowing, boxy thing.” And this is endearing. I can still get work done by moving content to the top of the screen while petted her irregularly.

Unquestionably though Pumpkin is the animated cat of the household. She is taking the retire out of our retirement and is a natural topic of conversation, not to mention exasperated cries, angry voices and yowls when she digs her claws into your legs. And yet she looks so cute and harmless all the time. No jury would convict her of anything, even with photographic evidence. She gives us a reason for living, if only to regularly put bandages on our legs and arms.

We’re hoping Pumpkin settles down soon but I have a feeling that’s not her nature. As long as she is alive she is likely to be in trouble and entertaining us. We had best adapt, and maybe that means wearing two sets of jeans at once.