Gracie Got Lucky

It was a dark and stormy night.... No, that's not right. It was a chilly, gray, drizzly, late Friday afternoon in, October of 2006.. I was at the Churchill Borough Building along with my husband and several members of the Pittsburgh Lace Group preparing for a program. The speaker was going to be our good friend Robin, who was visiting from California. We wanted everything to be extra nice for her that evening and were busy setting things up when I heard it. A cat was crying out in panic or something. Being a retired cat breeder, with over twenty years of experience, I knew right away what it was. The cat cries had to be very loud, since there were two sets of heavy doors between me and the cat. Mike, my husband heard it too and said to himself, "Oh shit."

Wrapped in a pink sweatshirt, being held by a lady trying to make a call on the phone that hangs outside the building (for calls to the police only) was a small bundle of fur with humongous noises coming from its mouth. Three or four of us came out and urged the lady to come into the foyer between the double doors. I told her to give the kitten to my husband Mike, who is amazing with animals (he even walked a skunk out of someone's basement without it spraying). I knew he could calm the kitten and that quieted things down fairly well.

This is how she ended up with the kitten. She and the other bus drivers were taking kids to a high school football game. They saw a man put this kitten out of his truck and drive away. They picked up the kitten, put it back into his truck and watched. He put it out again. She had his license plate number and was calling the police. The police were involved with some insanity that ended with a man driving his hemi onto the top of one of the cop cars, but that is another story. The moon must have been full or something.

Back to the poor starving kitty. The volume of kitten cries rose and fell at the same level of intensity as the woman telling the story. I thought, "Oh shit" and told her I would take care of the kitten. My friends told her it would be a good place for a kitten and she left with some confidence. I called my son, at home and said to bring the small cage from the attic to the basement. Then find a small cardboard litter pan and get the bathrobe that I had been on the verge of tossing. I didn't have to tell him why. He could hear the kitten in the background. He said "Oh shit." I don't know why that didn't end up being her name.

We bundled the kitten into a paper box and Mike left with her in the truck. I thought that the box would keep her from getting under Mike's feet on the drive to our house. I was wrong. She rode with her front feet on the dash or on the back of the seat watching and commenting. I called the vet as soon as he left and tried to get her in that night or the next morning, but grabbed the first appointment on Monday just in case.

The guys settled her into the basement and were shocked by how very skinny she was. She easily walked with her head tilted to one side, across boards in Mike's train set up. He worked on it a bunch that weekend. We kept her in the basement to protect our two senior citizen fawn Somalie brothers upstairs. We played a radio overnight for company and to keep her quiet. The boys were so deaf they didn't even notice she was down there, but I heard her off and on all night. We fed her a little bit at a time, from the time she came into our house, until we got her to the vets on Monday morning.

By then she weighed 5 pounds. She looked much better than when we first saw her. He guessed she was about 5 or 6 months old. She came complete with fleas and ear mites. I should have known about the mites, because of the head tilt. Her eardrum was perforated, but has grown back just fine. After about a week she came upstairs into my son's room. By then she had knocked enough stuff over that she had earned her name - Grace or when she is bad Gracie Lou. By the time she came out of the bedroom three weeks after she arrived, the boys just accepted her. Of course she is spayed. She is a pretty tiger cat now with a big belly. I think her body may remember being starved and so she eats more. It isn't that she is fat so much as there is not a lot of distance between her back leg and her front legs. She is a short, willful, cat who weighed 13¼ pounds on her trip to the vet yesterday. I know she should be on a diet. But our two other Somalies are thin.

I made a clock face from a picture(at the beginning of the article) of Gracie after she was living with us for a month. Her mouth was open and she was really skinny. You would hardly realize it is the same cat. She didn't grow any longer, only wider. My friends enjoy hearing Gracie stories. It had been a long time since we had had kittens, and she made me remember why I really prefer adult cats. Although Gracie is older now, she is still very vocal. She is not as clumsy as she was when she first came, but her name is stuck firm and she knows that Gracie means her.