Pete hated cats.
We now own a giant one called Albert.
Albert is a Maine Coon cat. One of the biggest domesticated cat breeds in the world.
He is Pete’s legacy cat.
Pete was never having a cat – he hated them... ‘Couldn’t eat a whole one’ he would declare.
But a mouse plague in the Riverina in the late 2000s meant we needed to get ourselves one, which is how our grey stripey cat named ‘Green’ arrived at our house.
The product of a stud Ragdoll sire having a fling with the neighbour’s hayshed cat, the breeder was keen to rid it from her house when we were looking for a kitten, and no amount of Pete’s suggestion that he should be called ‘Scaredy’ would convince the three-year-old that the cat’s name should be anything other than Green.
Green died suddenly last year at 9 years of age. Everyone was devastated. Even Pete – who agreed Green should be buried in the special spot reserved for only the most loved work dogs on ‘Old Dog Hill’ on my parents’ farm.
Our house was bereft of a cat and the children missed the company it gave them much more than we expected, especially when the cat’s death was the last in a long list of deaths in the family last year.
Therefore, Pete declared, if we were to get a new cat in our house it must be a ‘cool cat’, not just any old moggy we could get our hands on.
So he Googled cool cat breeds and said if we were to have a cat, a Maine Coon
would be the one we should get.
Months of searching for a kitten, contacting breeders, balking at kitten prices, stalking RSPCA shelters, and even missing out on free kittens from the vets, a breeder let us know she had kittens and we could have one.
So we committed to a Maine Coon kitten.
And Pete spent the last 3 months of his life lamenting that the statement “We have paid a deposit on a kitten” had to come out of his mouth.
While at the same time, he would proudly Google images of full grown Maine Coon cats to show people what we were getting.
Someone suggested we should have got a Labrador – it was smaller, and would eat less.
We chose the kitten with a visit to the breeder in December.
Pete refused to call it by its official name ‘Armani’ and so we settled on Albert … mostly so he could declare ‘Hey Hey Hey, its Fat Albert’ every time the enormous cat walked into the lounge room.
The kitten was ready to be collected on January 19. But due to our family holiday, we arranged to collect it on January 28.
Pete never got to meet the kitten he wanted.
But we now have such a highly prized, loved and needed cat that is so indelibly linked to Pete that nothing can ever happen to him.
When Pete died, a friend drove from Hamilton to Bendigo to collect the kitten for us so the children could have the cat they needed to cuddle at a time when they so desperately needed it.
Since then, I have found myself protecting that cat like a child.
It has had me wandering around the street at 5am in my pyjamas after he pushed out the flyscreen on the kids’ bedroom and found himself in a fight at our back doorstep with a neighbourhood cat and hiding in the backyard.
That frantic search for two hours bordered on hysterical and included me trying to placate one tearful early-rising child who was fearing the cat was gone, and another child refusing to get out of the bed because she had heard tears and feared something ‘really bad had happened’.
I seriously contemplated wine at 7am that day. Instead I drove to the supermarket to buy cat shampoo to wash his glorious coat of the cat poo he was now covered in.
Last week, he was let outside into a courtyard for some fresh air and I found myself up a ladder trying to get him out of a tree at roof height in high heels, late for work, only to have him fall out of the tree.
Despite my declaration of ‘don’t catch him cats always land on their feet’ to the kids, he hit the top of the ladder on the way down and had me frantically loading him and the now hysterical children up and racing to the vet for a check-up.
When I arrived and the vet nurses queried why I was there and I had explained the morning’s activities, I handed the cat over and declared “I don’t care what it costs, I’m late for work, don’t let him die …”
The cat was fine.
I’m quite sure the vet thinks I’m a crazy cat lady.
That day, my sanity cost me $77 in vet consultation fees.
Albert is perfect. He is enormous. He is the size of a large fully grown cat and he’s only six months old.
He stands on my chest at 6am in the morning demanding feed – just like Pete wanted him to.
He comes to a whistle like a dog and rolls around in the bottom of the shower with the kids to get wet.
He has inserted himself into our family in the most perfect of ways. And he is exactly the type of cool cat we needed.
For all the tears his fur has already absorbed – thank goodness for Legacy Cat.
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