Tuesday, March 09, 2021

 

Niño & my 1957 art piece on a cat.

A cat lady is a cultural archetype or stock character, most often depicted as a woman, a middle-aged or elderly spinster, who has many cats. The term may be pejorative, or it may be affectionately embraced.

Wikipedia

Up until 1975 when me moved to Vancouver Rosemary and I had dogs. It was here where we first acquired our first cat, Gaticuchi and we have had cats since.

 

Gaticuchi

 Our daughter Alexandra has three cats in Lillooet and she is in charge of catching cats to have them neutered or spayed. Our other daughter has an aggressive male cat that hisses at strangers in Burnaby.

In our Springer Avenue, Burnaby home we lived next to a cat lady. We moved so I have no idea if when she died she left all her money to the cats.

Rosemary & Plata

 Both Rosemary and I loved our cats. For most of the years we had them we communicated with them in baby-talk Spanish. I often thought that if Rosemary had ever talked to me the way she did to her cats I would have been in paradise.

The cat we had, Casi-Casi, before our (mine now that Rosemary is gone) Niño and Niña died of diabetes. My relatives in Argentine could not understand why we would spend money trying to treat and save a cat. They would tell me, “Es un gato y nada más.”

Rosemary's fave cat bag

  

My Portland musical friend Curtis Daily (baroque string bass) has a talent for pointing out stuff that should be self-evident. He told me that cats have had in their genes for thousands of years the information that made them be with humans. When I look at Niño I wonder if he might not have embedded in his memory that lingering caress by one of the Amenhotep pharaohs. 

 

Rosemary in Florence

 It was many months later that it suddenly became a thought in me that we humans having been with cats for thousands of years have an affinity for them in our own genes.