The orange cat is old now--fourteen, a goodly age for a cat who spends a lot of time outside. When I first met him, a half starved scrawny youngster of about a year, he climbed in my lap, head butted, purred, and then bit me, really hard, in the arm. I knew he didn't mean it. I understood; it was only that he needed love very badly--almost as much as he needed food.


      His fur was like straw, rough and dry. His eyes were yellow, but they would darken into ordinary pussy-cat green after a few months in a house which provided a bottomless bowl of chow. He was missing teeth--some, I think, never formed because he had been so starved as a kitten. When he was emotional, he bit hard, and sometimes he peed, too. The biting stopped, the pissing, sadly, never did. I think he'd been what breeders call a "whole male" for too long to give up this testosterone trait.


      I named him "Hamilton" after my favorite American Founding Father, another skinny red-headed orphan of the storm who'd come to these shores and found both his fortune and a poetic doom. Even the pissing seemed to fit--just read up a bit on the career of this soldier/ orator/statesman, and you will soon learn that like all good Celtic males, he got into plenty of the aforesaid contests with others among our now sainted fathers--men of high intellect, like Adams and Jefferson. Hamilton (mine) never backed down from a fight, and there were no more intruders in our yard of any wandering kind after he was fed up and comfortable in his new home.


      He slept on my head at night, or at least as close to on my head as he could manage. We finally worked out an agreement which meant he slept on half of my pillow and wrapped around the top of my head. Fortunately, I had been training myself to sleep on my back because of neck pain, so, especially in winter, his furry self became a sort of living nightcap.



      I had to adjust to him in other ways, too. All my raggedy chairs must sport washable drapes laid over the backs. These can be thrown in the wash every other day, when Himself has decided that, for some reason, he the back of that chair requires marking. So, over the fourteen years, my pale blue rug has acquired spots of you know what, usually behind the chairs, the edge of a closet door, the side of the fridge (now rusting through) or our heavy duty metal trash can--those favored places against which he most often backs.


      Don't think I haven't tried to stop it--with kindness, with blows and shouting, with squirt guns, with psychology, with anti-anxiety drugs of great expense and violent tossings out the door every time he was caught in the act. Nothing stops it, and so I figure it's as integral to who he is as his natural sweetness--those head-butts and couch cuddlings are worth putting up with a great deal. Hamilton actually killed one of my computers by continuously marking the CPU--and this was in the days when computers weren't cheap. First, the tape backup was ruined, and, finally, he finished off by squirting the "A" drive every time I wasn't looking. One of my friends told me that "If he wasn't orange and his name wasn't "Hamilton," that cat would be dead."


       There was some truth to this, especially in re my husband, who is not terribly sentimental about pets who do not "behave." Still, Hamilton sleeps on his head sometimes too, and never failed to be the last one to say "good-bye" in the morning and the first to say "hello" in the evening, tail straight up, head lifted, a smile on his face. No matter how bad the day had been, such a greeting improves life.


Note from the webdesigner:
Email from Julie dated Tuesday, November 25 2003  –  "Buried Hammie today. V. Sad."

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