elizaskinner.net - the jambox

I am going to take a break from my usually rage-filled teeth gnashing to tell you all about my late great cat, Frannie.

Frannie was a good time, clever and weird. She knew how to turn doorknobs and beg on hehind legs. My favorite joke as a kid (besides jumping out from behind corners and yelling “SURPRISE!!! Got ya!”, which in hindsight, is not really a “joke” at all) was saying “My, you’ve shrunk! And grown fur!” when Frannie would take someone’s recently vacated seat at the dinner table. She would just stare back at me from behind their plate, blinking.

She did not enjoying riding in bicycle baskets, or being petted below the shoulders. She had a love/hate relationship with wool sweaters which drove her to bite the nipple of anyone wearing one. Not the shoulder or elbow, but square on the nipple - any and every time.

Frannie really liked sitting on people. Like, REALLY liked it. Like really really. Really. So if she was trying to sit on you, and you weren’t letting her, she would just sneak onto you. She would seem to give up and sit next to you. Then, when she assumed you had probably forgotten she was there, she’d put one paw on you - casually. Then another. She would continue getting closer until she could stretch no further, and then she’d start sneaking into your lap full force - sloooowly moving onto you, freezing at any movement, sound, or attempt at eye contact. Like a terrible, obvious theif.

I can’t say that she liked being held like a baby, but she did allow it. The same goes for being wrapped in a blanket or dressed in a bonnet. I can tell you with certainty that she hated being shampooed and that shampooing a cat on a whim before school one morning is not a good idea.

Frannie was not above sticking her head in your mouth if you had eaten a donut recently.

She came running when someone called her name, or when the theme music of her cat tv video started. She loved her stories.

She fell off a balcony when she was pretty young, but lived. In fact, she lived to be 22 years old. The last times I saw her, she felt like a furry bag of q-tips and her eyes were like big wet black marbles. But she was still sharp enough to try to sneak into my lap.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 1st, 2006 at 4:22 pm and is filed under kittykats and puppydogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.