This thread is all about a very special cat that was a part of my life for a very long time.
Birdie, as we called her, may have crossed the Rainbow Bridge last June, but she touched so many lives and I know so many people out there really enjoyed reading about her silly antics and the different things she did over the course of her life.
This thread is dedicated in loving memory to the most special and wonderful friend and companion I could have ever asked the gods for.
Birdie's adoption:
May, 1990. I was 3 months away from my 16th birthday. We had lost a cat named Winky a couple of weeks before this, he had passed unexpectedly and both my younger sister and I were almost inconsolable, we missed him horribly.
My mother always listened to the local radio station during the weekends back then... I happened to be out in the kitchen getting some water when I heard the classified ads being announced.
There was a place up in Pinehurst that had kittens to adopt. One was a tortoiseshell, which was the kind of markings I believed that Winky had at the time. (He was actually a "classic tabby" but I didn't realize that until years later)
I quickly grabbed a pen and paper and wrote down the phone number for the kittens.... When Mom came out into the kitchen, I told her about it and asked her if we could go look at them.
Now my mother knows just what kind of animal lovers her daughters are... Both my sister and I would bring home any stray cat that we found around the neighborhood and want to keep them. At that time, we already had 5 or six cats and my uncle had one. She knew if she said yes, we'd probably bring at least one home, if not more than that. She said we could talk to Daddy about it and let it go.
Daddy wasn't big on getting another cat at the time, but with pleading from my sister (who was only 9 then) and me, he relented and said we'd go looking.
I remember the day we adopted Birdie so clearly... My parents, brother, sister and I all climbed into Daddy's van and drove the 20 plus miles to Pinehurst.
When we got there, the lady who owned the place took us out to her large barn, where the kittens were. There were four or five of them I think... One was a gray and black tabby shorthair, another one was white. But there was this little lanky one with odd markings and red in her fur. Her huge gray eyes stared up at Daddy as he went to pick her up and she hissed at him.
We had talked about getting the tabby kitten, because it was the calmest and tamest of all of them.
But we were all drawn to that little kitten with the unusual markings and red in her coat. After debating it for a while, we decided that the unusually marked kitten would be coming home with us.
My sister held her on the way home, the kitten was wrapped in an old sweater of mine. Her huge gray eyes stared up at me and she growled every now and then. *giggling*
During the drive, we all started discussing what to name her. My brother, who 2 years older than I am and who was a bit of an oddball back then, wanted to give this new kitten a really unusual name, he didn't think "Baby" was good enough for her. He suggested Luigi... That was nixed by the rest of us right away, my sister screaming it was "a boy's name!!" and me yelling it was awful!! The argument over what to name this new family member went on and on... I finally got fed up and suggested "Bugs" because I really liked Loony Tunes as a child.
Mom suddenly yelled "TWEETY!!" and after a few seconds of silence, we all agreed. Even my brother agreed that it was an unusual name for a cat, which shocked the rest of us!!
After we got home, my sister let the kitten loose in the house. I can still see Tweety creeping around the kitchen very slowly and getting hissed at by the other cats... The old tabby, Tygress, was VERY upset and even took a swipe at my feet as I tried to calm her down.
Eventually Tweety hid under the one living room chair and didn't come out until we put food beside it. Then she went back under the chair and stayed there until bedtime.
Mom put her in a box with food, milk, water, some litter and a soft blanket, then put a portable screen over it with a weight on it to hold it in place and keep Tweety inside. The box was set in the living room, which was right across the hall from my own bedroom at our old house.
I was almost asleep when I heard something... It was almost like a baby crying, but we didn't have a baby living in the house at the time. I heard it again and realized that it wasn't a baby, it was a kitten crying.
I went out into the living room and sure enough, the newest member of the family was yowling very loudly. I sat down by her box, talking to her for a while and crying.
Mom heard me and came out. She sat down beside me and reminded me that all of the other kittens we had were scared the first few days they lived with us and that Tweety was probably missing her siblings and mother. We sat with Tweety for a bit, then went to bed.
The next morning, Daddy let her out of the box. She basically hid under the one chair in the living room for about a week after we brought her home. The only time she came out was to use the litter box or eat. Anyone who dared to sit on that chair had their feet attacked by two little paws.
One day, my sister was showing me something with a baton she got as a souvenir from Ice Capades. It had long streamers on each end of it that flew around each time Sissy moved it. I was sitting on the chair that Tweety was hiding under.
Sissy messed up on a move and asked me to show her how to do it properly. I took the baton and suddenly felt something tug on one end of it. I lifted it up slightly and then I saw Tweety JUMP up after the streamers!!! Sissy and I just looked at each other and grinned...
I started moving the baton back and forth, letting the streamers drag along the floor. Tweety chased it happily, her lanky kitten legs a blur as she dove and jumped after it!!! The instant I stopped, she turned and zoomed back under the chair, growling.
It became a routine for Sissy or I to see if we could get Tweety to play. She fell for it almost every single time, running after the baton's streamers and zooming under the chair again after we stopped.
Slowly, she started staying out even after we stopped playing with her. She would sit and stare at me for a few minutes, but the instant I went to hold my hand out to her, she ran and hid. But over time, she started following me around the house when I was home and even let me pet her a few times. The first time she allowed me to hold her and she purred, it was shocking. I never expected her to do that then, I was expecting it later than it happened.
By this time, my dad had started calling her "Birdie" and the nickname stuck. We called her that right up until the day she passed. She did have plenty of other nicknames over the years (many given to her by a man I started dating a year later and eventually married) but that one stuck with her the rest of her life.
Two weeks after we adopted Birdie, a friend of mine from school called me to let me know they had a kitten for us to adopt. Since we already had Birdie by this time, Daddy didn't want another kitten.
I won't repeat what my friend's stepfather said here, it's too nasty to repeat. It did make Daddy pack us all in the van and head to my friend's place.
This new kitten was what we call a cream and blue calico... She was fluffy, mostly white but had patches of gray and beige all over her head and her back. Daddy said we'd take her and we had two kittens to watch rip the house apart instead of only one.
The newest kitten was christened Pookie, after Garfield's teddy bear. She was very friendly, loved to cuddle and purred as I held her on my lap during the journey home.
When we got home, Birdie took one look at her new housemate and started growling. Pookie just ignored her and fell asleep on my lap which ticked Birdie off even more... I was Birdie's territory by that time after all!!
The two of them avoided each other as much as possible over the next few weeks, but slowly started playing together and just wreaking havoc around the house, much to my mother's dismay... She lost a LOT of plants and had the living room drapes knocked down more than a few times when those two were kittens!!
Unfortunately, digital cameras were not very common back in the early 1990s... And I don't have any pictures of Birdie or Pookie scanned onto a disc yet, else I would post some. I do plan on getting that done as soon as my mother can find those photo albums for me to borrow and scan though!!
I do have some pictures from when Birdie was an adult. Enjoy!!
"Oh, HAI Mom!!" (She's 19 here):
"I'z gonna dive bomb you the instant you turn your back!!":
This is one of the few old pictures of her I have scanned and on disc, this one was taken at my mother's former residence back in 1999:
I'll post more stories about her on another day, when I'm not crying so hard.
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