My Cat Charlie

Daisy moved down from her third floor apartment next to mine to one on the second floor. Now when she meets me in the dining room, she does not ask, “How are you?” She says, “How is my friend Charlie?”

Friends call from New Mexico and New York. It is the same thing. They always ask, “How’s Charlie?”

Charlie is just fine. When I come home from dialysis, he meets me at the door. Each evening when I sit back in the recliner to watch “Jeopardy”, he climbs on top of me, but for “Wheel of Fortune” he moves over and stretches out on the coffee table.

He’s once again asking to go outside the first thing each morning. During the heat of summer he would not venture out of the door of the apartment (Not such a dumb cat!) But when the weather cooled, he still was reluctant to go out until one morning when I pushed him out the door. Now I let him out before I go to take my shower. After a brief stroll along the balcony, Charlie sits staring up at our doorway. Jim McMullen or Faye Scandlin let him in as they pass on the way to breakfast.

Charlie was always a slow learner. I don’t know what happened to him before he adopted me at the animal shelter in Albuquerque twelve years ago. He is a beautiful cat; he must have been someone’s pet. But he was picked up as a stray. The shelter sold him to me for $5. I took him to the vet, and it cost $100 for shots and to have him bathed and the matted knots cut out of his hair.

I suspect he had been poisoned. He still will eat only dry food. He always hopped up on the bathroom counter to drink running water out of the faucet. Only in the last year, with arthritis in his hips, has he learned to stay on the floor and drink out of a bowl.

For years he was terrified of men. My neighbor LeRoy came every Thursday to take out my garbage, and Charlie ran and hid under the bed. After ten years he finally let LeRoy pet him. Last week I was pleased when my new neighbor Everett came to the door to say “Hello”, and Charlie, lying on the carpet in the living room, merely looked up as if to say, “Oh, just another of Grandma’s visitors.”

So even an old cat can adjust to changing times and situations. I’ve always thought I was pretty good at that, too. But . . . .

My son David is here for Thanksgiving. He put Charlie’s photo on the blog for me. Now he says, “Mom, you do one.” I’m not even going to try. I am “technology challenged”. Besides, I have a son who is an expert. I’ll ask him to do more photos when he comes again next March. Meanwhile, all my pictures will be word pictures. You will have to imagine the rest.