By David Stone
I am an avid reader of the S.P.A.’s monthly newsletter, Paws & Claws. I have particularly enjoyed the articles about cats. Reading them has inspired me to write about my cat and what a joy she was in my life.
When we lived in Delavan, Wisconsin in the 1990s, my wife and son saw a small black Burmese kitten, apparently abandoned on the main avenue of the downtown area. She looked up at them with beckoning green eyes. They brought her home and named her for her color, which, in bright light, had a deep chocolate sheen.
As she grew, Choco raced around our big Victorian house, flying like a bat with her pointed ears, running so fast that she ran up the walls of the upstairs hallway. At the time I had an upstairs library with a large Persian carpet. One time Choco raced into the library when I opened the door to go in. She loved to roll on the thick carpet, explore the books on the lower shelves, and the artifacts on the upper shelves. She jumped up onto the upper shelves and walked daintily among the small items, without touching or disturbing the position of anything.
She was a princess who swatted the other pets: Amber, a big, friendly calico cat and Lydia, a large, friendly, wolf-looking dog. Unlike Amber, Choco resisted being put in a cat carrier to visit the vet or to move. On the big move to Maryland, Amber slept quietly in her carrier while Choco complained. After the move to the house in Baltimore, when everything was still in boxes, Choco was nowhere to be seen and I worried that somehow she had gotten lost or was injured in the move, but when everything calmed down she emerged from hiding.
In smaller quarters, with fewer rooms and no separate library, fewer bookshelves and no big carpet, I slept on a couch in the same room as my desk and fewer bookshelves and allowed Choco to sleep on the couch. I became active in mail art, including stamp art. I used a Choco stamp in my mail art. Choco walked on my table where I kept art supplies, flipped open the lid of an ink stamp pad, put her paw on the pad, then on a piece of paper which was next to the pad and left her paw print. She lived to the age of 21 and was buried in the yard of the house.
Adopt a cat from the S.P.A., Los Pinos 7, 415 152 6124. All their cats are shown on this page of their website: https://www.spasanmiguel.org/adopt-me-cats. I feel confident that among them is the perfect cat for you, one that will have an everlasting impact on your life, as my Choco has had on mine. I’ve heard that Eva, Robin, Pierre, and Salem would be wonderful family pets.
