THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, April 6, 1995 TAG: 9504060436
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 63 lines
Various readers who are in thrall to cats keep asking why I don't write about them.
Not a columnist in the country has written more about lions and tigers than this one. Ain't they cats?
All right, I was in the company of an extraordinary cat last week during a visit to cousins Pearl and Rhonda in Birmingham.
Named Sarah, she is a petite, slender, beige Siamese and has dark ears, paws and tail, and a small fist of a face with dark blue eyes and a charcoal-smudged nose.
She is fit to sit on Cleopatra's barge. Two dogs lay on the deck, oblivious. She picked her way around them, aware of everything, yet alone, a dainty isolationist.
Except for Rhonda. Sarah is bonded to her. When Rhonda is ailing, Sarah jumps in her lap and, meowing like a querulous baby, pushes her head under Rhonda's chin, a kind of get-well nudge.
``Sometimes she knows I'm not feeling well before I do,'' Rhonda said. Sarah won't have a thing to do with anybody else, not even Rhonda's husband, Mike.
Oh, once in a great while she will wind between Mike's feet, rubbing his ankle in a seeming caress; but when he, taken in again, stoops to pet her, she pat-slaps his hand.
She is 15 years old, but I doubt she will ever look ancient. Merely increasingly more attenuated, like some classic model with thin Egyptian unbending profile.
She arrived amid a storm that blanketed Alabama in a foot and a half of snow. Looking out the window, marveling at the caped world, Rhonda saw something dark against the snow, trudged outside and picked up a kitten that had been abandoned.
That was in Montgomery. When Sarah was 4, she jumped, unseen, into the car of a visiting couple and rode an hour or so to Birmingham before she was discovered.
When the car's back door was opened, the cat jumped out and glided away, vanished.
In Montgomery, Rhonda and Mike sorrowed. Midway the third day, Rhonda was in the kitchen making tuna fish salad when she glanced toward the back door and saw Sarah looking through the glass at her, too tired to make a sound, almost too tired to sit up.
``She was in a pitiful state of exhaustion as if she had spent every ounce of energy,'' Rhonda recalled.
``Everything was wrung out of her 50 times over. She couldn't meow to greet me. Her paws were shredded, just mulched up.''
She placed the cat in her favorite chair and, while the cat slept three days, rubbed antibiotic ointment on her paws. After the cat wakened and ate and slept again, Rhonda took her to the vet, who said she would recover and her far-traveled pads would grow back.
On the deck, she sat down within two feet and regarded me. I started to lean forward and hold out my hand but checked the impulse.
Never touch royalty. by CNB