Ouija
Passed away on Friday, May 16, 2008.
I'm not sure how many of my readers on Multiply knew about my cat, Ouija. I had once blogged about her on my Yahoo 360 page, but that was over two years ago. Essentially, in the summer of 2004, renovations were being done on the apartment I live in. During all of the month of August, the period of the renovations, all the windows and doors to my apartment were left wide open. I, personally, only used the apartment for sleeping during this period, and when the workmen came to work on the apartment for the day, I would leave the apartment and go to the Westmount Library, where I would learn how to use the computer.
At one point during this period, I began to notice paw prints on the bathroom sink. At first, I attributed these paw prints to squirrels coming into the apartment through the open windows. One day, however, I came face-to-face with this strange tortoiseshell calico cat prowling around my apartment.
At first, I tried to chase the cat out of my apartment, but she kept standing right outside and meowing to come in again. I eventually let her stay. She eventually became tame enough that she would jump on top of me when I was lying in bed so that I could rub her. She liked being rubbed for about ten minutes at a time, after which she would make a sort of disapproving growling noise to say she had had enough rubbing for the moment. But growling was all that she would do. In the nearly four years that I had her, she never bit me once. She was probably the most gentle cat that I ever met.
She ended up with the name “Ouija” for the following reason:
One day, when she started to eat the food that I had left in a bowl for her, when she was still quite wild, she made a sound that sounded like “Wee-je”. So I named her “Ouija”.
Ouija lived in my apartment for nearly four years. After the first four months of this period, she became pregnant, and had a litter of one kitten. The kitten died at the age of two weeks old, and Ouija was spayed shortly thereafter. After the grief that Ouija felt after losing that kitten, I had no intention of allowing that incident to repeat itself.
In April 2007, I ended up with a second cat. Some friends were moving into subsidized housing for senior citizens, and the place did not allow any pets. So they had to find homes for their three cats. I ended up with Tigger, an orange-and-white male Norwegian Forest Cat, mainly because it's difficult to find a home for a seventeen-year-old cat. After a few weeks of conflicts, Ouija and Tigger eventually learned to get a long with each other.
Ouija's last day on this earth began quite uneventfully. She seemed to be behaving the way she normally did, expecting her morning rubdown. At about 2 PM, I had to go downtown to do an errand. Before I left, I looked in on the two cats. Tigger was sitting on the old sofa, while Ouija was lying on the floor near him. Ouija did seem a bit quiet, but I didn't take much notice of it.
I went downtown and returned home. I lay down to rest. Tigger jumped on top of me, and I fell asleep in that position. After a couple of hours of sleep, I awoke and realized that Ouija had not come in to the bedroom to see me. I went to check on her. Ouija was in the exact same position that she had been when I had last seen her at 2 PM. I forced myself to go into the living room and rub her body. I felt a stiff inanimate object. Ouija was dead and may have been so for several hours.
I put the body into a plastic garbage bag and brought it down to the SPCA so that they could properly dispose of it. I know it would have been more poetic to bury it. But I live in the City of Montreal, and they probably would not have looked kindly into people burying their pets everywhere and anywhere.
I will end this posting with a reprint of the original article I wrote about Ouija in late 2005. Goodbye, gentle Ouija. I'll miss you. Maybe even Tigger will miss you as well.
A Cat Story
This story may sound a bit strange. But it is definitely true.
I moved into the apartment where I am now living in 1992. For various reasons, it has always been disorganized and chaotic in here. Because of this, on every occasion when someone had asked me if I wanted to adopt a cat that needed a new home, I had always passed on the opportunity. Things were chaotic enough here as it is without me having to cope with a cat getting into everything. And so it went for the next twelve years until the summer of 2004.
The year 2004 began relatively uneventfully, until about the middle of the month of March. Then, one evening at about 9:00 P.M., I heard a knock on the door.
I opened the door, and found myself face-to-face with a woman whom I had never seen before. She said that she wanted to inspect my apartment. I was totally unclear at that point as to whether she had bought the building or was planning to buy the building, but I am not one to make trouble, so I let her look at the apartment. I could see that she was not too impressed with what she saw. I suppose I couldn't really blame her. I am not the greatest of housekeepers, and, as well, the apartment had had a chronic problem of water leaking into my apartment from the pipes above it, which by then had caused some of the walls to deteriorate.
A couple of days later, I managed to speak to the janitor. The woman who had shown up at my door had NOT actually bought the building, but she WAS considering buying it.
The next few months were kind of stressful for me. I had had problems with a previous landlord both in 1998 and in 2001. This previous landlord had been threatening me with eviction on several occasions, and I was afraid that I was going to be faced with a repeat of the same phenomenon. It didn’t help that this woman and her employees kept making repeated visits to inspect my apartment.
By a certain point in time, it seemed to me that the woman must have had bought the apartment, since she seemed to be coming around so often. I was still paying the rent to the old landlord, but I thought that this was just some protocol of the sale, where the ownership had not yet been legally finalized.
At the end of June, assuming that the woman already owned the building and that she would probably try to evict me, I went over to Project Genesis to find out what my legal status was. I was told there that I could not be evicted without there being a hearing at the rental board, and that the whole procedure would take at least a month or two. So I was not in any danger of being immediately dumped into the street.
Heartened by this information, I went home feeling a bit more confident. But I had barely had one day of relaxation when I ran into the janitor again. It turned out that I had completely misunderstood the situation. It seemed that the building had NOT in fact been sold, and that it was still owned by the old landlord. But the old landlord wanted to sell the building, and the condition of my apartment was one of the main obstacles to the building being sold.
At this point, I was told that I had to clean up the apartment immediately, and that it would be inspected in a few days.
I managed to do some sort of clean-up, though it required my staying up all night for a couple of nights in order to do the clean up. The landlord showed up, inspected the apartment, said that it was clean enough, but that it would now require some renovations. He said that the renovations would not take place until August, and it was then barely the beginning of July.
Time seemed to go by faster than it should have, and before I knew it, it was already August. Various workmen started to come into my apartment, bringing the materials needed for the renovations. Soon the renovations had started.
I began to find the renovations a major inconvenience, and I especially became very upset when I saw my belongings being moved around in order to accommodate the renovations. The janitor advised me to stay out of the apartment while the workmen were working in there, in order to make it easier for everyone concerned. So I ended up spending all my days at the Westmount Library working on the computers, coming home only after 7:00 P.M., when the workmen had finished for the day. My life continued on like this well into the beginning of September.
But now to get back to the main subject of this narrative – the cat.
At some point during this period, I started to notice paw prints on my bathroom sink. As all the windows were being kept wide open to air out the apartment during the renovations, I assumed that some squirrels were coming up the back fire escape and coming into my apartment through the bathroom window.
For a while, I didn’t concern myself about the squirrels. Eventually, however, after the workmen had finally finished the renovations, the situation with the squirrels finally began to get on my nerves. So one day, before I went out, I made sure that both the door to the balcony (which could be reached by the fire escape) and the bathroom window were closed.
I did not return home until the late evening, and when I came into my apartment, I was totally surprised by what I saw. Wandering around my apartment was a cat which I had never seen before. The cat looked more or less like the cat in the photo at the beginning of this blog entry (the photo in fact was taken from Google Images). I immediately opened the door to the balcony, and chased the cat out of the apartment.
At first, I wondered how the cat had managed to get into the apartment with both the bathroom window and the balcony door closed. But then I realized what had happened. There had been repairs made to the bathroom plumbing, and a panel on the wall in the hallway had been removed to give access to the bathtub plumbing. The cat had presumably gone through the opening left in the wall and had gotten into the space between the apartments, where it had probably been sleeping while I was busy closing the bathroom window and the balcony door.
Things were quiet for the next few hours, but then I heard a meowing noise coming from outside near the bathroom. The cat had returned and wanted to come back in again. Apparently, it had decided that it now lived in my apartment. Presumably, during the previous few weeks, every day around sunrise, it had been coming into my apartment through the open bathroom window, which opened right onto the fire escape. It would then go through the opening in the wall into the space between the apartments, where it would spend the day sleeping. Then, when the workmen had left for the day, it would come out and leave the apartment, either through the bathroom window or through the open kitchen door. By the time I got home, it had usually already gone out.
I let the cat in again, and it went into the space between the walls. I began to wonder if the cat had a reason for wanting to come in so badly. Perhaps it was a female and had a litter of kittens between the apartments.
The cat kept to the same schedule for the next few weeks. I left the hole in the hall wall open, just in case the cat did have a litter of kittens in there. Eventually, at one point, the cat went away and didn’t return to the apartment until three days later. I decided that a mother cat would not leave her kittens alone for a three-day period, and I put the panel back into the hole in the wall. When the cat finally came back, it didn’t even notice that the hole in the wall was now closed up.
A few weeks later, someone gave me a small package of cat food, and suggested that I leave it for the cat and see if it would eat it. I tried, and the cat did in fact eat the food. I soon started to leave food regularly for the cat. I also set up a litter box so that the cat would not leave its calling card anywhere and everywhere.
So now I had a cat, even though it still behaved to some extent like a wild animal. It DID have a collar around its neck, but without any sort of name tags on it. So it MUST have had an owner at some point. But it still kept its distance from me.
At this point, I had not given the cat a name. But one day, when it went to eat its food, it made a sound that sounded like “Weeje”. So I gave the cat the name “Ouija”.
Finally, around November or December 2004, the cat finally came up to me and let me pet it.
Eventually, I found out that the cat was a female. And in March 2005, she was spayed.
So I guess that brings me to the end of my narrative. The only lesson that I guess I can learn from the whole experience is that life is to a large extent unpredictable. If you try to plan your life too rigidly, your plans will probably unravel, for that is the nature of the beast.
Sic transit mundi!
Monday December 19, 2005 - 12:33am
Tim Hortons trouble brewing: customer scolded over food for homeless woman
