History and Cats

I got Zuzu a couple of weeks back. the brother of my friend brought her home. and my friend disliked her and wanted her out of his place. so it ended up with me as doing him a favor.

i love cats and i am happy zuzu is here. its been 10 yrs i havent lived with cats. i cared for a few and fed some constantly wherever i was. but not lived with a pet cat since i was a teen in Sweifieah, Amman during the early nineties. i remember the wildest cat i had was Tiger; what a rebel cat he was. i remember how difficult it was to gain his confidence since he was a veterean street cat bruised on the mouth and the tail. he looked as if he had lived thru 2 world wars and is now full of memories and life has made him the tough guy he was. lol. thats how i remember him. his voice was very funny, yeah he had a character of his own. if Marlon Brando was a cat, Tiger would have been him! he went missing for some weeks before we discovered his body fur flat on some street in our neighbourhood... RIP Tiger!

Lulu II was something else, well bred good looking cat. i raised her since she could barely walk... i cant remember how we got her. she died horrifically though, i begged my father to take her to a vet but took me very lightly and his famous words: "what is this all about, its is just a cat, grow up!" . when her symptoms went dire, she barely walked and lost her balance and sight. i held her that day till her last breath... it was an awful experience and i remember crying hysterically afterwards. i always blamed myself for I might have fed her something sweet. after her death, i remember thinking how awful this world was and how insensitive our human nature is and how awful it is especially in our society towards each other and animals.

I remember the black one-eared, one-eyed cat back in Kuwait. kids in our neighbourhood picked on it and i guess one had her ear as a medallion. she used to sneak to our veranda on the ground floor and i used to feed her around midnight every night until my mother discovered that. she used to fear her and spread rumours in my head that cats transmit horrible diseases and give me unreal examples of kids who went cookoo because they raised cats when they were kids like me. i didnt buy it. i loved the black ugly cat for some reason. fed her throughout the 80s. she just disappeared one day and never saw her again.

i found Lulu (the first) at the attached caravan that was behind our old building in Nugra in Hawali, Kuwait. the 2 girls who lived there called me when they discovered her infront of their door steps. they knew they had to tell me because i was the one who loved cats around there. it was dark and they led me to their door step. Lulu was siamese with white fur and blacl/brown tail. beautiful blue piercing eyes. she had a silver neckless too. she also had rabies! and a circular hairless spot on her upper leg. it was clear that she was dumped by someone and Lulu found her way to the nearest home. i always imagined she was dumped by a nice car roaming around in our old and poor neighbourhood. i m sure they thought that at this densely populated place, someone might be able to take care of this cat for them. releasing them from probably any guilt. well that someone was me. and i immediately knew something was wrong with her, but i just picked her up and brought her home. cared for her throughout that school year until i guess summer vacation came along and we had to leave to Amman. i gave it to a friend of mine to look after her. when we came back after 2 months, her condition was worse. i later found out that she was locked in a one meter square bathroom all this time. my friends mother hated the cat and was not tolerant at all. i remember the moment when i brought Lulu back to our aprtment, she was extatic and jumped all around. it truly showed how much she missed the place and maybe me too. around the time my parents discovered that there was something wrong with her, they sent her to a vet and immediately tried to convince me that she was danger. we had to dump her away. we drove with her in our new 1985 Mitsubishi Gallant into another neighbourhood. my sister was with me and we were trying to choose a spot. the whole thing was so ironic.

there was also the mother who ate her offsprings when i secretely nursed her delivery at our veranda. a marvelous and shocking experience. i remember i was so furious about it, that next time i heard another cat do this i went on with some friends trying to punish the mother cat. i hit the mother cat with a pebble right on the head. i always regretted this!

another thing i regret is something i can vaguely remember, but happened nonetheles. it was summer 1983 at the building my father newly built then in Ashrafiyyeh, Jordan. my second cousins who lived in the shanties of the area since 1948 were wicked enough to put me up to a challenge. they challenged me to go and pick a kitten they saw and throw it off from the roof of our building. they were exuberant about it. i naively picked her up and climbed the stairs to the third floor where we lived and climbed on to the roof, opened the doors and off to the edge and dropped the cat. there was the daughter of Dr. Akram (who helped my mother when she was giving birth to me in Germany because she had this condition caused by cats), was on the ground floor and scremed and begged me not to do it. but i did. my second cousins who had not stopped laughing told me to come down again and pick her up and do it again because she was not dead yet! and i did that. this will never leave me...

so fast forward to Zuzu who is in my lap right now. just like a baby. every time i leave in the morning to work she starts crying at the door, scratching it with its paws and jumping on the handle. lol


cats have it their own way and will never understand you until you understand them. and i love this headstrong characteristic, they are like no other pet. one has to be consistent with them for them to be ok with u. because they remember everything. and they have a good learning capability, which is fun.