An Adult Cat

You should wish this cat happy birthday! She’s legally old enough to vote today.

There is a part of me that thinks we should try to get her registered, but if we did that some humorless right-wing idiot would come by screaming dimwitted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election at me and I would be forced to exercise my Constitutional right to remove from the planet through blunt force anything that annoys me and then there would be one less right-wing idiot cluttering up the US and there was a train of thought I was following as to why I should not try to register the cat to vote and I seem to have forgotten why doing so was a bad idea.

It will come to me.

Oh, right. Cats are by nature libertarians and nobody outside of a college dorm lobby at 3am on a Tuesday thinks that’s a good idea so going out of my way and possibly committing a felony in order to create another libertarian voter is just a stupid plan from the get go, so we’ll pretend I never brought it up.

It’s pretty impressive that she’s that old, though.

We got her from the local animal shelter after our most recent earlier attempt at owning a cat ended in ignominious failure. The cat Kim had when we got married had been moved to Grandma’s a couple of years before this in order to spare her having to deal with toddlers (when your two-year-old comes up and says, “Hey, Daddy, I’m a cat! HISSSSSSS!” it’s probably a sign that the cat just isn’t happy with small children) and eventually a friend gave us a new one who ended up hiding in the basement for two months and then running off in the dead of winter, never to be seen again – much to the heartbreak of Oliver and Lauren who just wanted a pet – so when we went to the shelter for a new one our priority was to find a cat who was friendly.

They let you play with the cats before you make any decisions, and it didn’t take long for us to choose this one. She played with us.

They told us her name was Smokey and we thought we’d keep that until 5-year-old Oliver started calling her “Smokes” and we thought this might give people the wrong impression of our parenting skills so we batted around ideas for a new name for a while. I finally suggested Mithrandir, which any Tolkien nerd can tell you means “grey wanderer” – it seemed fitting for a grey cat we found at the shelter after they took her in as a stray – and Kim agreed as long as we shortened it down to Mithra. She often goes by Pookie for some reason. I assume it has something to do with her secret double life of crime and I don’t pry too much.

She’s been a good and faithful companion. She likes her people and will be reasonably friendly to visitors, unlike Midgie who is the most cowardly animal I’ve ever owned (up to and including the turkeys) and will hide at the slightest suggestion of company. She’s utterly incapable of sitting still in your lap unless she walks all over you for a while beforehand. She’s put up with 4H Cat Shows, innumerable veterinary visits, and even Midgie, who is a sweet cat but a bit of a noodge. She was a good hunter in her day.

She’s old now, and mostly blind. She can see shapes and shadows but we’re pretty sure that’s about it, and whenever we come home from work she echolocates at us until we find her and let her know we’re there. We have accepted that we will not be rearranging the furniture for the foreseeable future. She’s also a bit arthritic and we’ve put little staircases up to the taller chairs and the sofa. The things you do. Other than that, the vet says she’s in pretty good health.

Mostly she likes sitting with you, warming her old bones and generally hanging out with her people.

We’re not really sure when she was born, of course. The shelter told us how old they thought she was when we got her and we did the math and figured Labor Day 2004 was close enough, so that became her birthday to us.

And here she is, legally an adult in person years.

Happy birthday, Mithra.