I consider myself a seasoned pet person. My husband and I have shared our lives with 14 cats and one dog in our 30 years of marriage; we had cats long before we had kids and have always had at least 2 cats at a time.
But I admit I was surprised to come home two days ago, open the refrigerator and find Cat #14--a black and white kitten we called Max, who found our pet-loving house a mere six days ago--sitting on a carton of eggs in the middle of our refrigerator, blinking as the light went on.
Fortunately, my daughter and I had been gone for only about 40 minutes. Before we left I had opened the fridge and Max had jumped onto the bottom shelf in pursuit of a delicious half-eaten roasted chicken there (not that I blame him). I pulled him out. He went in again. And a third time. I turned to laugh with my daughter about it and I'm sure that's when the little guy made his move.
Then, yesterday morning our 16-year-old son ran downstairs, rumpled, sleepy but agitated, yelling "Where's a Phillips screwdriver?" I thought he was sleepwalking and in the middle of some bizarre dream. But: "I need one, fast! Max is caught in the vent in my room and I have to unscrew the vent cover."
Max, it turned out, had crawled into an open floor vent on the other side of the house and burrowed through the air ducts all the way to our son's room. He was peering up through the vent at us, meowing pitifully as we finally got the grill off and scooped him up. Needless to say all the vents have now been checked and securely covered.
I'm wondering if Max is one of those daredevils-in-training. You know the kind of kitty I mean--one with higher aspirations than the usual curious feline. Our Cat # 5, Carmel, must have been part mountain lion--he liked to climb up on the highest book case and leap from that to an the top of an open door and then to the top of a refrigerator. Floors? Puh. Cats # 11 and #12, Zeus and Apollo, or # 9, Minxie, each had a talent for getting into mischief.
But they were all pikers compared to Cat # 2, Toots (1977-1998). He was a huge, tough Maine Coon that my husband got free from a record store (record store, how quaint) in Chicago. Toots was handsome, ornery, fearless. And adorable. He had a loud, screeching, irritable meow--you always knew where he was and if he was displeased about something. And he was displeased a LOT. Toots cut a swath through the various Illinois towns and cities we lived in during his long life.
When he was a youngster we were living in a high rise apartment building. One morning I left for work and as usual glanced up at our windows from the street, about a block away, before I got on the El. It was lucky that I did--there was a lanky Toots teetering on five-inch-wide ledge--outside our seventh-story window. It was a sizzling hot summer day and no one would have been home for at least 8 hours. I still don't know how or when he crawled out, but I hurried back home and pulled him to safety--not that he really wanted to come back inside.
Early in his life Toots was plagued with a series of bladder infections and had to be hospitalized four or five times. Although he was a big softy with the family and slavishly devoted to my husband, he hated vets and cages with a passion. We had to rotate him to new and unsuspecting vets each time; one vet posted a sign on his cage: THIS IS A MEAN CAT (did I add he wasn't de-clawed, so if you got too close to a sick Toots he hissed, spit and had a lightning fast left hook?)
Unbelievably Toots lived just shy of 21 years. I still don't know how; he truly was the cat with nine lives and old age didn't slow him down. When he was 15 he climbed into our crammed garage and knocked over a big wooden ladder that fell on and broke his leg. This was not long after he endured a bad infection that puffed up one ear, causing it to be drained, stitched and permanently flopped-over.
My brother looked at Toots with the one folded ear, the rear peg leg in a cast, and said memorably: "All that cat needs is an eye patch and a parrot on his shoulder". RIP, Tootsie.
Anyway, back to Max and the refrigerator. This, I admit, was a new one for me; his vent sortie for some reason surprises me a little less. How about you? Anybody else find their cat in a refrigerator? Where is the strangest place you ever found your kitty?