Our Messed Up Pets

Edgar was our family's second cat. The first cat, Dopey, was still around and trying to get used to sharing the house with a toddler and another cat. Edgar was easy going enough that those things never really mattered, as he regarded the hissing fits with calm ignorance. He was a lover, not a fighter. Everyone was his person. As aggressively antisocial as Dopey was, that is how dedicated Edgar was to spreading warm feelings to all of God's creatures. In time, that would become a problem.

Edgar was named after Seattle Mariner great, Edgar Martinez, partly because Edgar was slow moving and everybody liked him. The second year that we had the 2 cats became a busy one. We were working, we were volunteering at church, we were pretending to know what we were doing with house maintenance, the first child was walking and talking and never sleeping, and my wife was pregnant. September and October got away from us, and we unintentionally allowed Edgar outside without getting him fixed. Pretty sure that was my oversight. We vowed that we would tackle that problem once everything settled down. It was one of those seasons in life where you just can't take on anything more because you're in survival at any cost mode. That's when you stop caring if your socks match, eat too much take-out, and sleep in very short increments.

Edgar went missing for a day in the middle of all that chaos. If it weren't for the fact that the 2 1/2-year-old kept impeccable track of where everyone was at all times, we probably wouldn't have even noticed the conspicuous absence. If the cat food was eaten and the water was drank, it was safe to assume that the cats were alive somewhere and just didn't care to make appearances. This was more true of Dopey, but a cat is a cat.

So, we had long overlooked something else, even before that crazy autumn, and it only became apparent when I went downstairs to the basement. It turned out that Edgar had been pregnant and was then a mother of 3 darling little kittens. Either we had been very, very wrong about Edgar's gender, or Edgar was some kind of feline/seahorse hybrid. It was the former. Edgar was a mommy girl cat. Oops. You'd think that would be an easy mistake to avoid if you know anything about anatomy, but I clearly don't know much about cat anatomy. This would not be the last time I got that determination wrong. It's a thing.

A cat we thought was a boy, 3 newborn kittens, and a box of books that we'd be throwing away when this was over. It turns out that you cannot ask your wife who is 9 months pregnant to go down the stairs to the basement and clean up the kitty delivery stuff. The 2-year-old was only so happy to help at the news of kittens, but her view of helping tended to fall short of actual aid. She asked me if the kittens were boys or girls. I just smirked. Obviously, I was not the one to answer that question. Since it was the fall 1998, the home run race between Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Ken Griffey Jr., had dominated the news and the steroid bombshell had not yet ruined the reputation of the first 2 hitters, the names were easy to come up with. The offspring of Edgar became Mac, Sammy, and Junior.

Mac, Sammy, and Junior were not with us long. They were adopted out to other homes. It hurt to see Junior go to a girl down the street from us, who changed his (her?) name to Moonlight. Sacrilege .

Edgar's name never changed despite the gender discrepancy, and she made a visit to the vet to make sure there were no more surprise kittens in the basement. She developed some age related problems in her legs so she walked like a robot for the last few years of her life. Robot kitty was probably the most normal pet we ever had, with the one big quirk being caused by our ignorance rather than anything she had control over. As her leg problems worsened, she resided mostly in the older daughter's room until it was time to go to robot cat heaven.