It’s Friday again, and I’ve made it another week on this! I really am starting to not want to do this at all. That probably means that I need to keep doing it, even when I don’t want to!

Write about the stray animals you brought home.

A not so great picture of Oliver, with our rat terrier puppy, Corky. Kind of fun that WordPress makes it look like an old Polaroid, since it actually was scanned from a Polaroid one-step print.

Well, there weren’t that many memorable ones. The one that I remember best is Oliver, my little black and white cat.

It was 1990, and Mom and I were going out for a little bicycle ride. We liked to ride around the section – a four mile bike trip in all – on our old-school bikes. Hers was one she had since she was a kid; mine was a restored bike from the 1960s.

We were over by the Cox place when we heard a little mew.

It was a kitten…a scrawny, poor looking black kitten with white accents. Poor little thing. We tried to catch it, but it ran from us.

But it was only a kitten, and a kitten hiding in Johnson grass is no match for two big people who can move quickly. We caught the kitten and carefully took it home. Once in our yard, I sat it down with food and water and it scurried away to hide in the lilac bush.

The lilac bush was a better protector than the tall grass on the roadside, and I couldn’t catch the kitten anymore. I sat around for a while, but finally started to go back around to the front of the house.

But oh how that kitten cried when I walked out of sight!

I came back around the corner and he ran under the lilac bush again. I turned and walked away, and he cried and started to follow me. I started to come back and he raced again for the lilac.

This went on for a while. I finally got him out with some food placed near the lilac bush, where he had to come out a little to get a mouthful. After he felt more comfortable eating like that, and thought he had nothing to fear, I grabbed him. Just like that.

We named him Oliver, after the orphan in the Dickens’ novel, and moved him into a box in the laundry room until he felt more comfortable around us. Our other cats, Frosty and Jezzie, hated him violently, but Oliver never hissed back or got angry. He was very nice. He was also a little addled, I think.

I had never thought about it before, but if people can be mentally handicapped, it would stand to reason that a cat could too, I guess. Oliver was as sweet as can be, but he had some major problems mentally. He had to be taught, again, and again, that the food and water was on top of the dryer. (We kept it there so the dog wouldn’t get into it.) There were other instances that made me feel he wasn’t all there, but a lot of it was just the look in his eyes. Unlike the other cats, Oliver just sort of looked like he was a few bricks short of a full load. It’s hard to describe…but I’ve never met another cat quite like it.

We had a fire a few months after he came to live at our house, and the laundry room burned pretty bad. My parents had it renovated, and the door to the outside was moved from the back of the house to the side of the house. Poor Oliver never quite got over this.

The back door was the cats’ main way in the house, and where they came to eat and drink. They were able to easily open the screen door with a swipe of the paw, and they would relax in the laundry room, then go back out to the big bright world.

When the door was closed off, Frosty and Jezzie didn’t like it, but they were able to adapt.

Not Oliver. Years after the laundry room door moved, Oliver would still be sitting on the little square of cement that marked the old back door, meowing to be let in. I’d call him over to the side door, and he would come over and go inside, but he always tried to get in the old door first.

Of course, he might have been hoping to get back into the old laundry room before the renovation – the one that was messy and had a concrete floor and there was a way to get underneath the entire house in the crawlspace…a cat’s paradise. The new laundry room was clean and organized, and there was no way to get in the cobwebby crawlspace any more. Poor kitties.

Frosty and Jezzie gave up on the old laundry room, but Oliver never did.

Oliver died in the same way all of the cats of my youth did, in the street in front of our house. Not Frosty, but he was Marissa’s cat. My girl Jezzie and another black cat of mine, Cassie, also died in the road. Not a good place for cats.

He is buried there at the house…I can’t even remember exactly where. But I do remember how slender he was, and how sweet, and how much he loved me. And I remember how he cried for me when he was a little kitten, even though he was afraid of me. I called him Oliver Andrew Pace. He was a good kitty.

I’m so glad we went for a bike ride that day.