Cats

In my former writing below, I said that we are dog people. This is true. But I don't want to give you the idea that there were never any cats around. There were.

Both my grandfathers tolerated cats. They were farmers and the cats kept the mouse and snake population down. My Great-grandmother LeCrone (Sarah Elvira Dyson LeCrone - but she went by "Ella") lived, along with Great-Granddad LeCrone, in a mobile home on Pa LeCrone's farm south of Helena, Oklahoma. She had a pure black cat whose name was either Satan or Lucifer (I can't remember which, my mother will have to remind me). Satan killed mice and snakes, but he would also help himself to baby chicks from time to time.

My Dad never spoke of the cats from his childhood as having names. Dogs had names, the cats were just "the cats." Dad liked to tell the story of getting one of the cats and putting it in a gunny sack and swinging it around and around for several minutes and then letting it out of the bag so he could watch it walk around "drunk." Oh, I know... So call the SPCA. There wasn't much for an eight year old to do on a farm 27 miles west of nowhere. Those cats learned to fend pretty well for themselves. They had to fight off the dogs, the coyotes, and my Dad.

We never had cats growing up. After I was married, however, I did have two cats. The first one was Ginger, a seal point Siamese. I remember the time when Ginger was in heat and tore her way through a window screen in order to get out for her amorous rendezvous. My two boys were 5 and 6. They came to tell me that Ginger was now married and that her husband was black. Not too long after, she gave birth to a litter of black and white Siamese kittens. One of the cool things about Ginger was that she could talk. Well, she could say "ham." She loved ham and when I opened the refrigerator door, she would stand there and say "ham" to me. No, really. Ask my wife and kids.

Then somebody gave me a kitten that we named Enri or Ornery. He was a gray tortoise shell. We had him for ten years or so. When Enri was a kitten he had huge ears and an extremely long tail. He was so hyper-active that I remember him running sideways across the couch, using his claws to hold himself perpendicular to the floor. After we got him fixed, he settled down and became one of the fattest cats I've ever seen. He grew into his ears and tail. He weighed 27 pounds. After that I quit calling him Enri and started calling him Fat Kitty.

My wife TJ grew up on a farm 17 miles west of Fairview, Oklahoma. Her childhood was filled with cats. She told me that at the height of their population, there were something like 17 of them running around. She named every one of them. She also dressed them in doll clothes and drove them around in a baby buggy. Call the SPCA, again.

Finis Jennings Dake was the only cat I ever knew that lived in the same house with my Dad. Finis was Davy's cat, given to him by someone who obviously hated him. As I mentioned in a comment below, Dad was yelling at Finis one day and got his tongue tangled. He called him "Sinus" by mistake. This cracked Dad up and from then on Finis was Sinus to him. I don't remember Sinus staying around long. If I recall correctly, he was soon given to a home where there was a bit more feline love going around.

Dad called cats "city tats." Perhaps I'll start posting Dad's Dictionary today. Yes, I believe I will.