Cat Magick
late 1980s
This may seem an odd little story, but it bears telling.
When my dog Lady passed, my cat Bast began to notice the family Head Count was off.
He had gotten over his initial idea that Lady might be a danger to him, and now she was gone.
It was decided to get a companion for him, and as at the time I was working as Animal Control Officer (ACO) at the local animal shelter, one cat in particular I thought might fit in well.
She was a just-spayed female grey tiger-stripe cat, with an awesome white bib and mittens.
I showed her to my mother who immediately recognized it to be A Mickey Cat, similar to the same cat Mickey that she and my father had when they lived in Brooklyn before I was born.
Before we moved to Verona, and a few years before my brother came back east with his dog Cami and his male grey California Spangled cat he'd
named Mickey
(after the Mouse),
our local family had a female Mickey cat again.
There was a clear obvious distinction between the two indoor cats.
While both were very affectionate, Bast was an outright klutz while the larger cat Mickey was graceful.
I figured Bast could clumsily knock over a pyramid of bricks while Mickey could climb up and down the other side of a tower of champagne flute glasses, and not disturb a single one.
Bast could jump, but sort of had to work at it, and comically would flail a bit.
Mickey's jumps looked like she could levitate, floating up like a soap bubble.
One thing Mickey really disliked was her collar.
Bast never really thought about his own, obviously, but Mickey went to great lengths to remove her collar.
More than once we'd come across her discarded collar.
She'd sit there, glaring at whoever put it back on her.
One day she wandered in to the living room, and we noted she was collar'less again.
This wasn't overly surprising, but this time we could not locate the collar.
My mother and I searched everywhere to no avail.
As were about to move, we figured we'd find it eventually.
We packed up the house, cleaned up every bit of dirt we could once the furniture was out... but that collar never revealed itself.
Somehow our Mickey had managed to hide it outside our reality, we jokingly decided.
The cat/s never ever went outside and every square inch of the house was exposed, but no collar.
Once settled into the new house, we got Mickey another collar and tags, which she "chose" not to remove.
Lady
Bast
Bast and Mickey