When I went away to college for the first time, I was living in a small apartment in Student Housing at K-State. I was very lonesome…missing my family and my pets. I was not allowed to have pets in my 1 bedroom apartment. I tried taking my young Siamese Cat, Moses, with me. However, he was so wild, I was afraid someone would hear him in my apartment and turn me in. So I sent him back home with Mom and Dad.
I was hoping that I could find an older, quieter cat that I could keep in the apartment. Mom came to visit one day and brought in a large package in a JC Penny’s bag. I set it on the floor and inside was a cat carrier with a beautiful silver Persian Cat inside. The cat’s name was Tater. Mom had had the cat for over a week, and had kept it secret for a surprise. She said in that week she’d tried and tried to win Tater’s affections, but any time she tried to pet the cat, Tater would bite her!
For the first few days, Tater hid out under the bed. If I tried to get her out, she would hiss at me. Then one day I came home and all of my kitchen scrubbies and a pair of folded socks were in the middle of the living room floor. I knew the cat had to have done it, as she and I were the only ones in the apartment. I put everything back up, and the next day they were all back in a neat pile in the living room again!!
One day I was sitting on the couch and hear the most awful racket. Tater comes into the living room with a pair of my rolled up socks in her mouth, and she’s meowing this pitiful meow!! I guess that maybe she had had white kittens at some point, and maybe she thought she was carrying around a lost kitten or something.
As she got comfortable with me, we became friends. But she soon started another bizarre behavior. She started running around my apartment in the middle of the night like her tail was on fire. She would zip from one end of the apartment to the other over and over again. I lived upstairs, and I wasn’t supposed to have any pets in the apartment. She sounded like a herd of buffalos running through my apartment. I tried several different things to get her to stop. I tried feeding her. I tried shutting my bedroom door, and I tried holding her in bed with me. None of these worked. One night out of desperation, I took her and got her wet in the bath tub. She had to lick herself dry, which took a while….and hence ended the wild running.
The whole time I lived in that apartment I had to wet her down on a regular basis.
When I went home to visit Mom and Dad, I didn’t want to leave Tater in the apartment by herself. Again, I was afraid that the people downstairs would hear her and know that since I wasn’t home there must be an animal up there. So I took her with me. To sneak her in and out of the apartment, I would put her in the cat carrier and then cover it up in the JC Penny’s bag. We did this for TWO YEARS and never got caught.
I had not been in my new apartment very long when the Air Conditioning went out of my Pontiac Fiero. I didn’t have the money to fix it. Riding around with the windows down wasn’t really a problem for me, but poor Tater had a thick and long fur coat. When I would take her in the car with me to go home for a weekend, she’d get over heated and start panting. To fix this problem, I began packing her cat carrier with ice packs, and that kept her cool. I enjoyed her company so much those two years. She helped keep me from getting lonely.
When I graduated from college and began traveling, I took her with me on the plane. Tater was a very good traveler!!! One time when I was flying with her, we had to change flights in a major airport. I had heard horror stories about pets getting lost when planes where changed. I asked the flight attendants repeatedly if my cat had made it onto the plane. I refused to take a seat on the plane until I knew that Tater had made it safely aboard. Finally the flight attendant told me that if I would just get on the plane she’d let me know when my cat arrived. So I’m sitting in my seat…still worrying….and they announce over the intercom. “To the passenger in seat 3A, your cat has now safely arrived on the airplane and we can depart from the gate.” I wanted to crawl under the seat!!
We had a lot of good adventures together.
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