Ernie

The Cat Who Came to Dinner and Stayed

by Cherub Saunders

Anyone who has ever had a cat will know what I mean when I say you don't own them. You may own a dog, horse, or any number of other animals, but you never own a cat. They own you and allow you to stay with them.

And you can only stay, if you abide by their rules. By rules, I mean that you allow them to have full run of the house, by day and early evening. Then when the sun goes down, they want to be free to roam the great outdoors. Then they proceed to stay out all night and do what cats do during the night.

[ If you ever thought the Masons were tight lipped, you don't know cats.]

One never just goes down and picks out a cat, like you do other pets. The larger majority of cat owners all tell the same story. It goes like this: They never intended to have a cat, but one day their cat just wandered in and joined them for dinner and stayed.

My husband, Stan, and I live near the ocean in sunny California. We had no pets and didn't see any need of them. We enjoyed each other and liked to travel, so we felt that pets would only slow down our travel plans. Then one day, I was outside enjoying our beautiful ocean view, when this large grey and white cat came into the yard and just walked into the open sliding screen door. As we had been having trouble with mice running through the yard and I was afraid that they might also be in the house, I thought I'd let the cat stay inside for a little while to get the 'cat scent' around the house in order to frighten off any possible mouse.

[ I have never known a house to have a mouse problem where a cat live. ]

That was Mistake #1 You don't even let them in for a short while, becauses they take a look at your home and decide if they want to live here with you or move on. If they like your house, they just settle in.

This cat didn't have any collar but 'it' looked well fed. At the time the cat came to join us, I didn't know if someone had just dropped it off or what. I hated to let the cat starve. Actually, that was a laugh because it probably would have taken weeks for this cat to have gotten down to a weight that could be described as starvation weight.

The cat had a beautiful white face with the greenist eyes that looked straight at you and dared you not to love it. The rest of the body was gray except for the legs and feet that were also white. We weren't sure of the sex of the cat as it had a very pretty face so could have been female, but it was a very large cat, so my husband thought it was a male. As it had very long hair, it was hard to tell.

When the cat first appeared it was right after Thanksgiving so I gave it turkey scraps. No wonder the cat wanted to stay. The cat was always frantic to get inside the house so I made~:

Mistake # 2 I let it in. This cat was the smartest cat I had ever seen. (I have had several cats before but this cat was smarter than any of them.) You only had to tell this cat something once and it never forgot.

When it first came into the living room it started to put it's claws into the carpet. I yelled, "No" and it never did it again. If it felt the urge to flex it's claws, it would lay on it's side and flex it's claws into the air. And when we would go walking in the street, because there were no sidewalks, if a car would come, the cat would jump up onto the curb and stay there until the car passed.

After about two weeks, we decided that we had to see if this cat had an owner as we didn't want to get too attached to it if we had to give it back. After talking to some of the neighbors, we found that the cat belonged to a neighbor down the street. So, with the cat following me and healing like a dog, we arrived at it's owner's house. After I knocked at the door, a lady answered and when I asked her if this cat belonged to her, she told me it did. She told me that it was a male and it's name was Ernie. The cat used to come indoors, but they had gotten two large dogs and now the cat wouldn't come in. I asked her if she could keep Ernie contained somewhere for a while and perhaps it would stay home then. She did and we didn't see Ernie for several weeks.

Then one day Ernie showed up at our door again. We tried to ignore him but he just kept pressing his little face against the glass of our sliding door. (Cats know how to look pitiful.) When the cat didn't leave for two days, I finally broke down and fed him. Of course, then he was ours again.

We own a vacant lot next to our house and one day I noticed the Ernie going to the bathroom in the vacant lot. It was squatting down like a female, so when it came back again I turned the cat over and looked to see if it was indeed a male. With all the long hair it was hard to tell but I couldn't find any evidence of it being a male. I then decided that it must be a female and that did it! I felt that if the owners didn't even know what sex of cat they had and didn't pay any attention to it, they couldn't care very much for it. I renamed Ernie, Emilee. (I didn't like Ernestine which was feminine for Ernest.)

She really was a beautiful cat but after she joined our household, it was never the same again. When I said that she was smart I eventually found out that she was too smart. Just when I thought that I had outfoxed her, she would do something to out-do me.