A Cat and A Door

Well, let me tell you a little more about our only cat pet - Abby.  Her official name was A.B. Normal.  Uncle Byron is a very "punny" kind of person and thought is was a unique twist on abnormal. She was certainly a different kind of cat.

Uncle Byron found her at the Missionary Aviation Institute hangar when he was studying there in 1989 or so.  Seems there were a lot of little kittens and Byron had heard some of the younger students talking about putting the cats in a cardboard box and sending them for a little boat ride on the campus lake.  So, he decided to save at least one from death by water and brought it home.

Abby was so very little that I don't think she was really ready to leave her mother.  We fed her milk with a little medicine dropper and had to teach her to eat smooshed up cat food dampened with milk.  We had to help her learn all the things that a mother cat would have taught her babies.  The vet that saw her suggested dampening the corner of a washcloth and washing her like a mama cat would with its tongue every time Abby was fed.

Abby she was so small that she couldn't get over the edge of the litter box I bought for her, so I made a "step" for her to get in with an old plastic bowl.  She never ever did any business on the floor.  If she couldn't get in the box for whatever reason, she would sit beside it and meow.  I would go and put her in.

We lived in an apartment near Piedmont Bible College, at the time, in the top of an old, office building.  There were four apartments, each with someone from the college.  There were two other cats - Smokey, who was older and a little mean, and Libby, who was younger and a little stew-pid.  {I gave up using the three bad S words a few years back, so I won't spell it out for you - but that cat was rather unintelligent. If you don't know what the three bad S words are, I'll tell you some time in another story.}

When Abby was big enough, we would let her out in the hallway to "play" with the other cats.  Smokey didn't come out often - only when her owners were at home.  Libby was usually out in the afternoons.  They would run up and down the hall and the stairs and play on the outside stairs and around the back of the bottom of the building.  They never went far.

Abby had a good life, but she did develop a few bad habits.  One of her bad habits was waking us up early in the morning for her breakfast.  As soon as she was big enough to jump up on things, she would walk on the top of my dresser in the wee hours of the morning and gently push things off to get our attention.  Things like perfume bottles and deodorant sticks and jewelry!

One day when we were in the bathroom, Abby's little tricks got us into a sticky situation.  Now, we were in the bathroom at the same time because it was the only room in which we ever turned on the heat.  We weren't home that often since I was teaching and Uncle Byron was in school.  And, the apartment wasn't very cold since the offices below were well heated.  So we only turned on the electric heat to take baths or if we had company.  While one took a bath, the other sat on a little stool to enjoy the warm air.  While we were in the bathroom one evening with the door closed, we heard a big kaboom.

Abby had jumped up on a big wooden storage box that sat just outside the bathroom door.  It has a big front door that came down to the floor on a hinge towards the front.  It could be totally removed so Uncle Byron could hide his tool boxes and junk in it.  While we were enjoying the warm bathroom, Abby wanted in.  She got on the box to meow at us a little better and knocked over the wooden door.  And then we couldn't open the door of the bathroom to get out!  The wooden cupboard door was wedged in such a way to block our exit.  We tried a few different things but the doors were stuck.

We banged on the wall near the tub - we could always hear our neighbors when they were in their bathroom.  They were home, but never answered.  So as the minutes turned to an hour, Byron decided to try to crawl out the window.  There was a little ledge, from there he thought he could hang down and jump to the ground.  He had the keys to the apartment in the bathroom in his pants' pocket.  So from there he could just come back up the stairs, unlock the door, and let me out!

Just as Uncle Byron was ready to make his leap to death, a guy walked by on the sidewalk beneath our window and looked up.  We recognized him as a student of Piedmont but didn't know his name.  He asked what in the world we were doing.  We tried to explain but the story got a little silly in the telling.  Thankfully he agreed to help and Byron threw down the keys for the fellow to get in and help us out.

As we were talking to him afterwards our bath-wall neighbors came out of their apartment, listened to the whole story and apologized for not coming to our aid sooner.  They said they had heard us but thought we were just goofing around?  Yeah, their cat was the Libby one... bless their hearts.

We fixed the wood cupboard door after that, scolded the cat, and watched the aquarium for a while since we didn't have a t.v. and went to bed under one of Nanny Granny's big heavy quilts.

Lesson learned:

Don't take a bath in the only heated room of the house and leave your cat on the outside.