The Story of Big Boy and Sweety Claws
Hello. everybody! As a non-technical cat-lover, I will have a profile for you as soon as I have learned how to make one. Meanwhile, I am a writer, singer and guitar-player who has avoided becoming famous for years now. By way of introduction to the inspirational chaos I call home, I thought I'd begin with a story.
Noticing that the humans around here all have an alias, I think it only fair that cats should be offered the same protection. You never know when a lawyer might be listening. So the heroes of this tale will be known to you simply as Big Boy and Sweety Claws.
Chapter 1: Introducing Big Boy.
Of the four kittens born into that back yard on the 1st of May, he grew up as the one who wasn’t chosen. His sister got first shot at the Family, but saw something better over the horizon and dissappeared one day. Typical. She was never seen again. Somebody got a postcard from Miami, but my guess would be her fatal attraction to fast cars.
Anyhow, while Sis was lying by the fire eating sardines from a champagne glass, Big Boy was learning street-craft in a world of bricks and trash cans. Around every corner was a tom-cat who was bigger than you, ready to give you a face full of claws just for sniffing at his territory. Or his females. And Big Boy, who wasn’t at all yet, had to learn fast how to deal with them. And their females.
This proved to be invaluable experience for the young pretender when the Family came to their senses and selected him as replacement cat for the errant sister.
Humiliating as it was to be second choice, and having to wait one and a half years wearing a black-and-white house uniform to no avail whatsoever, Big Boy was big enough to be magnanimous, and took the family in as though they were his own.
Time passed. He grew tall. Well, for a cat. And as he learned to survive in his new environment, he began to get a slightly better opinion of his sister. There was plenty of food in the kitchen and warm sofas to curl up on in the living room, sure enough, but in between was a floor which demanded combat training at the very least for a cat to make it through alive.
The place was full of feet! Pubertal man-kittens (the female of the house had four) stomped around over every horizontal surface with feet like canoes. Worse still, they seemed to have no control over the legs attatched to them, so no matter how quickly Big Boy moved out of the way, the feet would suddenly change direction like UFO’s and come thundering down on top of him.
Still, Big Boy was a clever cat, and could see that this place had potential. The street was full of houses with gardens like his. Birds and rodents in abundance, defended only by a few pampered toms. A kingdom without a king.
For the next eight years, Big Boy took on all comers and fur flew. He remembered the aphorisms of his youth: ”Buff beats fluff”, for instance, which that orange-coloured Persian should have remembered, or ”It’s not the noise you make, it’s the fur you take.” True enough! We are still laughing at the Tabby who got what could only be called an abstract poodle-cut.
As he grew, he also began to understand that strange expression of his uncle Herman, ”Mine’s the one in the pink bow!”
For eight years, Big Boy ruled the whole neighborhood, and johnwayned his way through males and females alike. This accomplishment, not remarkable in itself, perhaps, was made so by something which not even Big Boy was aware of. He remembered a trip to the doctor when he first got the Family (probably checking his superb physical condition) and he remembered having a sore bum afterwards, but no-one told Big Boy what it was all about, so just he continued with business as usual.
And so life went on. With a minimum amount of leg-rubbing and rolling over, our hero could wrap the Family round his dew claw, and so long as the Bearded One remembered to feed him, he could spend his days and nights as he pleased.
Then came that awful summer.
And the Little Sister From Hell.
