A Happy Cat Story Before I Sign Off
This is a story that was printed in the NY Times. For a change, it's a happy story. Just thought I'd share it with you before I take off on my journey to the midwest. See you in a few!
The New York Times
Down by Third Rail, You Need Nine Lives
By RANDY KENNEDY
The search for the Fulton Street subway cat started the other day with a hopeful heart and a healthy dose of skepticism.
For years, there have been clear signs at the station pointing to the existence of a full-time feline resident there - the suspicious absence of mice, for one, but more tellingly the tiny cans of cat food that seem to materialize behind a steel column on the downtown platform of the J and M lines.
A morning token clerk swore that the cat was real and so did a Brooklyn psychologist, who reported having seen it on her way home from work. But the consensus among conductors was that the cat was just a figment of the imaginations of weary subway riders, particularly of the nice woman who exits the train around dawn every weekday and carefully sets out cans of food for it.
"I think she might be . . . you know?" said one conductor, making the swirly-finger sign for insanity. Another conductor said: "I've seen food there for years. I've never seen no cat."
A third said: "I kind of worry that maybe that woman is feeding a rat and she just thinks it's a cat. You never know around here."
With that pleasant thought in mind, a visit was paid to the station and the investigation was formally launched. In short order, it revealed the aforesaid cat food at the edge of the platform - a can of Nine Lives Salmon Supreme Entrée, another of generic-brand chicken and rice, and some dried food, accompanied by a dish of water. But it also revealed evidence of a kind of consumption that had cat, not rat, written all over it: the salmon was missing but the generic chicken and the dry food were untouched, apparently disdained.
Carmen Figueroa and her boyfriend, Agosto Astorga, sitting on a bench nearby, continued to be dubious. "I never heard of a cat living in a subway station," Mr. Astorga said.
But just then, at around 11:15 a.m. he looked over the shoulder of his questioner and his eyes grew wide. "Oh, dude," he said.
"Oh my God!" Ms. Figueroa exclaimed, pointing. "Look."
Up and down the platform, heads turned. And behind the column where the food sat, another head also turned, a small one belonging to a distinguished, slender gray cat with dark gray stripes and a neatly washed white face, poised over the salmon. It stared intently at all the people staring in its direction, quickly took another bite and then hopped down onto the tracks, where it perched languorously atop a running rail and began to lick its paws.
It was probably not as momentous as tracking down Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster, but for the station's regulars it was a memorable event nonetheless: the Fulton Street cat had been found.
A makeshift committee gathered near it on the platform and began to debate why it was there.
"Maybe there's a litter of little kittens under there somewhere," Mr. Astorga surmised.
Israel Nieves sized up the cat and concluded otherwise: "He is a hunter. He likes to stay here for the hunt."
Later, Joey Calvanico, a glazier from Brooklyn, seemed to confirm this theory. "He's got a mouse!" he yelled, kneeling on the platform to give the play-by-play. "He's got it under his paw!"
Efrain Ortiz, for his part, wished that those skills could be exported to the side of the station where the No. 4 train stops. "A rat ran right into our train once," he said, grimacing. "We need a cat like this over there."
But in the end, no one could quite figure out why a cat would choose to live under the platform of a working subway station and spend its days lounging on the tracks, where it must rouse itself every 10 minutes or so to leap out of the way of speeding trains.
"The only two things I know," said Lawrence Jackson Jr., a station cleaner, "is that somehow or another, he knows not to go anywhere near the third rail. And he's clean. He never does his business up here on the platform."
"Other than that, who knows about that crazy cat?" he added. "He's a loner."
The only person who might have known more was the mysterious woman with the cat food, and with the help of a diligent photographer, she was finally spotted the other morning spreading out the sustenance for the day.
But even Muriel Sterbenz of Ridgewood, Queens, the primary benefactor of the Fulton Street cat for the last five years, said she could provide little information about it, other than a fairly good idea of the sex - female - and a name, which she has bestowed herself: Schatzie, from the German word Schatz, or sweetheart.
"I can't figure out why Schatzie wants to stay in that subway station either," conceded Ms. Sterbenz, a soft-spoken office worker for the State Insurance Department.
"But I know one thing," she added. "She sure wants to stay there. People have been trying to catch her for years. She's too fast for the subway, and she's too fast for them, too."
TTTFN!!! See you soon!
:D
