Photo of the Day - May 23 2007 - Socks

Don't let those beady eyes fool you. Socks is a wimp. And a sweetheart. He is a great cat. We didn't intend to end up with four cats (you've seen Corduroy; Mohawk and Boots are coming). Our oldest cat Mohawk is 15 years old. She is a grump, but a nice old grump. A few years back we decided to get our youngest daughter Madeline a cat, and we ended up getting two, whom we named Corduroy and Oxford. They came from different litters, but were the same age, and grew up as brothers. They were inside/outside cats. Corduroy became a real cat of the night, a hunter, and was more aloof. Oxford remained closer to home, in body and heart. He was a first rate cat pet. During the day he followed Madeline around and sat with her wherever she went, doing school work (we home school Madeline), reading, sitting at the computer, whatever. He loved to sleep on the back of the couch right behind wherever you were sitting. At night he usually slept in the bed with Anna, my fourth daughter. One day a lady from the neighborhood came up to tell us there was a dead cat in her yard, and she thought it might be ours. I went down to see, and yes, it was Oxford. Only Madeline was home with me. It was really really sad, and terrible to see her suffer so. (We still expect foul play - at the time there were a group of teenage guys vandalizing the neighborhood, and we had turned them in for something to the police, and they had done various things to us in retaliation. Oxford seems to have taken a blow to the top of the head. Yes, it could have been a car, but one of the boys was seen in the vicinity about the time our neighbor told us about the cat.)

I believe in the reality and significance of relationships with animals, and thus the very real grief we experience when they leave us. I've never taken this lightly, for myself, or for others, nor as a pastor. Anyway, I wrapped Oxford in plastic bags, and when Anna came home I broke the news to her, and let her pet Oxford and say goodbye. We brought Corduroy over and let him sniff and look at Oxford's body too. He was obviously very depressed for a week or two. We then had a ceremony and buried Oxford in the back yard. Well, the grief was so bad that three to four days into it we decided we just had to get Madeline another kitten to try to get her mind off it. So, we went to the Cat Clinic, and wouldn't you know it, someone had just found an abandoned litter of kittens and given the whole litter to the Cat Clinic to give away. So, we ended up getting two new kittens - Boots the small gray female, and Socks the larger black male. We decided they would be inside cats. They are about three years old now and they still run around the house wrestling and playing, especially late at night. They are mischievous and fun, just as cats are supposed to be. When they wrestle, it's always Socks who cries uncle, even though he is twice the size of Boots. He is a wimp. But he is so affectionate; he loves to have his coat brushed; he begs for attention; he is very sweet. Boots is sweet too, and follows Madeline around kind of like Oxford did. I love this picture of Socks, taken with a cheap digital camera. It just exudes his "Socks-ness."

For more pictures of our felines along the way, look here.

Joel

PS On the way to work today I stopped for a foot long snapper crossing Regents Park Lane. I got out and moved him. It's hard to know where turtles are wanting to go, and you hate to disorient them, but I put him close to a nearby creek. Well, as a reward I got doused with turtle pee. I say turtle pee. I wonder if turtles "store" water within the spaces under their shell to keep them moist when they are on land. Does anybody know?