Dexter is the 9th cat I've owned. This number isn't high because my parents enjoyed having multiple cats living in their house. It's high because somehow, cats don't last long at the house I grew up in. We always took good care of the cats we had and loved them each but some of them have just disappeared and others have died of unusual causes. I can't really figure it out but our house should be on some Cracked.com list about weird cat stuff.
The first cat that my family had was named Rosie Roosevelt Rainbow Cook. My eldist sister named him when she was about 8. I don't really remember much about Rosie except he had one leg missing, he really liked American cheese slices, and he died in a fucked up way. My parents usually tell the story about me dragging him by the hind legs so I could watch him hop along on the front one and how they had to buy me a stuffed animal version of Rosie to keep me from cutting his hair off with safety scissors. I was three, alright?! Anyway, I was 8 when Rosie died. You see, Rosie was an outside cat. He'd meow at the door when he wanted to get in and did the same when he wanted to roam out in the woods behind our house. One day Rosie decided to wait by the garage door in order to get in, rather than the back door like usual. My mom watched as he came in when she opened the garage door and, as her story goes, when she started closing the door again, Rosie decided he didn't actually want to come back inside and darted for the yard. Rosie didn't make it to the yard because he was crushed by a garage door. Supposedly my mom didn't do it on purpose but she complained about the cat all the time. If you're a parent and you're wondering about traumatizing your kids when telling them about death, try not to savagely murder their childhood pet.
After about a year of mourning (on my sister's part, I was fine the day after Rosie died because I was a sociopathic kid apparently) we decided that it was time for a new cat. For some reason, I decided I wanted to play the day they went to go get the kitten and even though my mom told me they were going right that minute, I figured they would wait for me. Well, they didn't and in my grief of missing out, I kicked my shoe off so hard it hit the ceiling. There is still a mark from where it hit. My sisters and mother returned with two kittens: a black kitten and her orange pile of fluff brother. We named them Cosmo and Elaine after the Seinfeld characters because Elaine was the smart one and Cosmo was literally retarded. It's not his fault though. I'm ashamed to admit this but as I said before, I was a sociopath as a kid, or rather super ADD and stupid when bored. Anyway, one day while in a fit of this ADD boredom, I decided to pick up my cute, sweet little orange kitten and start yelling loud noises while holding him about six inches away from my mouth. I guess I just wanted to see his ears twitch. We figured out fairly quickly after that that Cosmo was deaf. His deafness didn't make him stupid but not being able to properly function and learn because of it did. Elaine took pity on her idiot brother and would catch mice for him so he could prance around proudly with it in his mouth while we climbed on couches to get away from him. Now of the two, which do you think has the survival skills to go outside and not get snatched up by some animal? If you thought Elaine, you are seriously mistaken.
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| Cosmo and his serious survival skills in action. |
Elaine, like Rosie, liked to venture outside. She was a supremely clever cat and would always come back to the house after a couple of hours. She would climb up on the railing of the steps leading up from our back yard and, with an immense amount difficulty given the distance from the railing, tap on the window where she worked out that we would most likely be while meowing her head off. Elaine was also partial to human food in the form of potato chips and became quite fat because of it. This probably made her a tasty treat to a predator in the woods behind our house because one night, she just disappeared. Elaine wouldn't have run away because she seemed to have the impulse to take care of her idiot brother and god damn she loved potato chips. Her disappearance still bugs me because she was probably the smartest cat we ever had. Meanwhile Cosmo would get outside occasionally, revert to freak out mode, and hide under the overhang of our back porch, hissing at us when we tried to bring him back inside.
After Elaine disappeared, we had a run of female cats, all in an effort to control Cosmo and the mouse population of our house. (continued in Part II)
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