While both Brian and I had stories in our past of peoples cats that made us shudder, which had made both of us think we weren't really 'cat people', the decision was made to get a cat over a dog never the less. Why? Because of our life at the time. It was ever more practical and feasible to leave a cat at home alone for a long weekend, then it would be to get somebody to keep letting a dog out, etc..
The farmhouse apartment we had lived in before moving here, had a big barn next door, which was owned by some people whom lived down around the lake. We called them to see if they happen to know of anybody whom had free kittens. They told us that that was much more a spring occurrence, but they would check around for us. Later they called back stating that some friends of theirs had just found kittens in their own barn and would be glad to let us have one. The arrangements were made for the kitten to get from it's owners, to our connection and then through other people, to us.
We had not told the boys that we definitely were getting one. One night in November we just loaded everybody up in our suburban and headed back up to where we had just moved out of. The boys were told to wait in the truck while we (Brian and I) went inside for a minute. Inside we found the kitten inside of a cat travel case, with the home owners Labrador scaring the heck out of it. (Perhaps those memories is what kept Rascal from ever fully accepting Boo). We left the house with the kitten tucked securely inside my coat, hoping to keep it hidden there till we arrived home.
It wasn't to be!!! Oh could that teeny little thing meow loudly!!!! Goodness!!! And oh could he climb!!! For awhile I bore the proof that he had all of his little claws. Mercy!!!
Were the boys ever surprised, and thrilled!!! The kitten got ever so thourally inspected and loved almost to pieces (explaining how tightly you could and could not hug/hold a kitten took a bit of reminding for awhile ;-p) that first night. And the next day. And the next. And when they arrived home from school on Monday, they had to verify that we still had him...
While numerous different names were suggested, we decided to wait a couple of weeks and see if any particular name really fit him. It had been about two weeks when one evening as I was sitting in the rocking chair watching the boys play with him, I laughingly told the kitten "You're a little rascal!!!". At once the boys started declaring, "That's it Mom!" "That's a perfect name for him mom", etc.. And thus he was named. He lived up to his name to the very end!
We have heard that 50% of an animals personality is the animal itself, and the other 50% is due to the animals environment. We believe there is a lot of truth in that statistic!
You hear how cats won't come when they are called. As a kitten, Rascal would almost go head over tail in his hurry to come to you. True, sometimes in his latter years he'd just stare at you, but then again, so does Boo sometimes, let alone "the boys". ;-p. But other times, even in his late adulthood, Rascal would come when called.
In many ways Rascal perceived himself to be much more dog than cat like. For many years he loved to play fetch with the rings off of milk jugs. His humans would tire of it long before he usually did. He liked to hide underneath the dining room bench closest to our walk through path and totally without warning, jump out and grab ahold of whom ever was passing by. Sometimes he scared you oh so good! Then he'd just peer up at you while cocking his head sideways and meow ever so cutely. He was a rascal!!!
Sometimes I'd hear this noise and not be able to figure out what exactly he was doing. He liked playing under the white dining room bench. He'd jump between the top of the bench and the full length support beam underneath it. And back and forth and then take off running through the house. And could he ever get up steam (let alone noise) while running! Often during the day, you'd hear him "THUMP" down off of a bed upstairs and then run full hilt through the upstairs, or down the staircase. His name was Rascal. His nick-name was 'Thunder Cat'. And yet other times he went into some type of stealth mode and appeared in a silent fast blur out of no where.
Every single time that we were gone for a weekend, he would come bellowing down from upstairs as soon as we entered the house, giving us all kinds of heck for having left him home alone for so long! Occasionally, he'd even be waiting for us right inside the door. As if to prove he didn't want us to leave again, he would attach himself to one of us by wrapping all four legs around one of our legs and holding on for dear life. Most often, it was Benson or I that he picked. While everybody else emptied the vehicle, his chosen captive would try to comfort the poor love deprived kitty.
I clearly remember about mid August of one year. I had been working in the kitchen up at camp for nine weeks straight. Brian had come up every weekend. The boys had spent some weeks up there, and then some time elsewhere. That evening after I had gotten home, I was again sitting in the rocking chair. Rascal had jumped up into my lap. I greeted him, expecting him to settle down on my lap and demand petting forever. But instead, he had kept climbing. He'd put one paw on either shoulder and literally rubbed my nose with his. It was ever so comical, and yet heart warming at the same time.
When we first got him, he had been a short haired cat that didn't shed. Round about the time he turned two, his hair changed. He became a long haired cat whom most defiantly shed! Mercy! The older he got, the more he seemed to shed, and the more my allergies to him worsened. For years he would let me brush him down. At first I could do so on my own. Then I had to start wearing a mask over my mouth and nose to do so, which he wasn't always thrilled with. But then it got to the point that when I tried brushing him, my eyes would start stinging, and swelling, and stay swollen for a day or so, so I ended up giving it up. I kept a container of wet ones on my night stand so that if he jumped up on the bed with me and I forgot and petted him, I could wash my hands before I fell asleep and got my hands near my eyes.
Rascal was a talker! The whole family will attest to him walking through the house calling something which most definitly sounded like "Mom?!?" He also said something, which, while it did not sound like 'Benson', it most definitly was whom he was inquiring about!!! Sometimes I would tell him that Benson was in the basement, and he would turn, head out of the room, and straight to Benson in the basement. If Benson got home later than what Rascal deemed an acceptable time, Rascal would give him quite the talking to!!!! And how he abused the word hello!!! Oh man. Sometimes in the middle of the night, he would stand at the bottom of the stairs and call out "Hell-wo-o-o?", and keep repeating it, gradually growing louder, until somebody whom he had awakened would holler "we're all up here Rascal!" or, "Come here Rascal!" or some such. Just yelling for him to be quiet didn't work. We had tried, but it didn't!.
Once Brent and Boo had moved back home again, we always had the gate at the top of the staircase closed due to how Rascal and Boo usually wouldn't get along. In the evenings, when Rascal could hear a bunch of us gathered in the living room, he'd stand at that gate calling, then yelling, then bellowing his "hell-wo-o-o-o?!?!?!?!" getting so loud sometimes that we would either turn up what we were watching, or give in and try to have the two co-existing in the same room. He WANTED to be where we were!
Over time, perhaps because of my reduced interaction with him due to my asthma, or perhaps due to my frustration with a couple of the things he had started 'pulling', Rascal grew less attached to me, and more and more attached to Brian. It wasn't that he had never cared for Brain, not at all. Use to be that Brian was getting home from work about the time the boys and I were trying to leave the house in the morning. Via the kitchen window, Brian would watch us load up in the truck and pull out. While he's not sure how it started, the minute we walked out, Rascal would be sitting by his feet waiting for a treat, which we kept in the drawer next to that window. In-fact, it got to the point where Rascal would be trying to climb Brian's leg wanting (demanding) his treat while we were still in the house and Brian would be pointing out to him that we hadn't left yet! Comical!!
Rascal would sleep with Brian during the day and Benson at night. Brian tried to teach him that it was okay if I crawled into bed during the day too, due to headaches, or vertigo, or whatever. I had my side of the bed, and Rascal was suppose to stay on Brian's other side. Usually however, Rascal preferred to climb down between the two of us and then over time spread out, thus leaving both of us clinging to our sides of the bed. How a twenty two pound, very long cat, could take up so-o much of a bed, and make himself unmovable (as though he weighed twenty two tons instead of twenty two pounds) we never did figure out.
Rascal wasn't thrilled with Brian changing shifts. Once Brain did go to bed in the evening, Rascal would jump up on the bed and give him quite the talking to over the whole situation. One night, just last week, Brian was already in bed, I was getting ready for bed, and Rascal was somehow sitting in the middle of the bed, with Brian petting him and consoling him. As I started to get in bed, I sort of lost my balance and put my hand down. Goodness! Rascal quickly informed me in a no un-certain tone, that my hand was on their side of 'the line'!!! A definite rascal!!!!
Like I said, he almost always slept with Benson at night. Pretty much the only exception to that was the summer's Benson spent at camp. The summer that all of us lived up there, Brain and Benson had ended up fetching Rascal up there too. That summer he liked being let out of our camper on a leash and loved to lay in the shade underneath it. We tried letting him out on a leash here at home, and he wanted nothing to do with it what so ever! However, if Benson was sitting on a chair on the porch reading a book, he often gave in to Rascal's pleading and took him out there with him, wrapped safely in a blanket.
For awhile Benson had had a bunk bed in his room, who's top bunk was occupied by all of his stuffed animals, and often Rascal. Benson could walk into his room not even thinking about the fact that Rascal might be up there, only to be jumped at, or attached by out stretched paws. Rascal enjoyed that game a bit to much at times! Smirk, smirk.
I had just sat up onto the edge of my bed trying to figure out what the noise had been and what I was smelling the night of our house fire, when Rascal jumped up onto the bed beside me. Suddenly the lights of my electric alarm clock went out and I knew that that was my 'sign' if you will, that I had to get the boys up and we had to get out of there, and now! I should have scooped Rascal up when I jumped up, but I didn't. And to this day I regret that I didn't. He followed me to the doors of the boys rooms to wake them up, he followed us to the top of the staircase, but he didn't finish following us down the steps. Had he already seen the flames in the basement? Had the smoke filling the bathroom and the kitchen scared him up to me? Probably.
We escaped out the front door only to hear him bellowing for one of us from the top of the stairs. Benson was pleading with me to let him go get Rascal. Part of me wanted to let him. Part of me wanted to do it myself. But as I had stepped off of the porch I kept remembering stories of people whom had quickly run back into to nab a pet and been killed because right then the building had exploded, or collapsed, or some other horror. I didn't want to lose Rascal, but there was no way I was chancing one of us. As I had left the porch I had looked towards the back yard, there was huge black clouds like filling it. I followed them up... our chimney was billowing black smoke as though our house was an old coal train engine. I could not see through our back yard to see the garage. This was way to serious, way to scary.
Thankfully the firemen were able to find Rascal. He had hidden himself up in the bottom side of our bed frame. That is also where we found him later at the hotel, after having searched every where outside thinking he had escaped out of the door during all of the commotion of people coming and going. That first week, the insurance company had us staying in this hotel like suite with full kitchen, two full baths, etc.. That same night after he had been found after being in hiding, I looked up to see he had jumped up to the partical wall of our bedroom and was walking the wall. The thing was, it was over a sixteen foot drop down to the main floor, but he never wavered, just called 'hi' down to me. Crazy cat!
From that week until the time we were able to again live in our own home was a six month period. During that time we moved in with my then bachelor brother Craig. Thing is, he is HIGHLY allergic to cats. So poor Rascal was confined to the basement bedroom. It took us awhile to figure out that the reason our borrowed air mattress bed wouldn't stay filled, was due to tiny cat nail holes.
He hated being confined to that room. After a while we barraced the small section right out side of the room so he had a bit more of wandering space. That cat found ways to climb and escape upon numerous occasions!!! We just couldn't seem to keep him in there. So finally I brought home a solid sided shipping skid from work and stood it lengthwise in the door way. We even sat odd stuff on top of it. That worked, for about three weeks. Then one night in the wee morning hours, I was awaken to Rascal's voice calling "Hell-wo-oo?!?" And then "Mom---" My fuzzy brain could not figure it out, seeings how I was in an upstairs bedroom that week, and he was trapped in the basement .... but then I head the bedroom door squeak further open and Rascal bounded onto the bed, his "Hell-ow-o" full of pride, as though "Look mom, I found you!!!". Oh how I had wished Craig wasn't so darn allergic! But we knew that being the personable cat that he was, Rascal would hate being stored at some shelter type of place. He was one thrilled kitty when we moved back home!!!!!
The last few months Rascal seemed to be striving even harder to live up to his name. To the point Brian had questioned if the cat was getting senile, because he kept doing the type of stunts he had done as a kitten. Things like practically climbing into the fridge and meowing "Milk" (SERIOUSLY!) while tapping the jug with a paw. We gave him milk again. (We always did at the beginning of every winter, and he would scarf it down. But other than that, it was hit or miss whether he would want some or not.) Things like begging for treats again, which we did have a package of in the drawer, even though he had turned his nose up at them for a long time. We gave him treats. Etc.
The last couple of months we had seen lots of evidence that Rascal's time with us was soon to be ending. Some times we thought it was ever so eminent, but then he would rally and be ever so sprighty and full of life, that we joked about how "he'd probably out live all of us". If only he had. If only.
Not only had he again been doing things like he had when he was young, he had also been seeking out the other members of the family for attention again. I've mentioned how close he was to Benson, Brian and I, but he had always also done lots of inter acting with the other family members as well. He was not a cat to be left out of things! In-fact, once he had almost tipped over the lit jack-o-lanterns while trying to investigate them, let alone the time he had climbed the Christmas tree.
Speaking of Christmas tree. Chuckle, chuckle. For years we always went and cut down our own tree. We learned that the tree sap infused water under the tree, was it's own k ind of cat nip (which we never bought) for Rascal!!! Man did he love that stuff!!! I had the hardest time keeping water in the tree holder, had to refill it daily!
The Christmas after our house fire, we used a friends fake Christmas tree, and for asthmatic reasons have never had a live tree again. Rascal was insulted, to put it mildly. He approached that first tree with caution, sniffing the air and then looking back over his shoulder at us as though to say, "somethings not right here!". He went under the tree. He exited with disdain clearly written all over his face and gave us quite the talking to!!!! It was highly comical from our perspective, but not from his. We took pity on him and cut a branch from one of the small trees in our yard and set it under the tree in a bowl of water. He actually thanked us. So-o-o rascally!!!
Like I shared, he had also been seeking out the other members of the family for attention again. One morning while Byron was here two weeks ago, Boo and I had been up for about two hours when Byron got up and wandered into the den where I was. Seeings how I hadn't spotted Rascal in any of his usual haunts when I had gotten up, I had figured he was up under my bed. Nope. As Byron was standing there talking to me and Boo was in on a couch, Rascal came wandering in proud as punch talking up at Byron and then rubbing his leg. A surprised Byron leaned down and picked him up saying "Well hello there .....". Rascal had purred and talked and snuggled for a good twenty minutes. Was he saying his "goodbye, thanks for loving me, I love you too." ? And he had done similar stunts with Brandon and Brent.
Brian and I had pulled out around 4:00 on Sat.. We were escaping to a friend's cottage for a couple of days, next week is our 30th anniversary. We had slept in on Monday morning, but when we entered the kitchen around nine, Brian's cell phone was beeping due to missed messages. The only way we get service up there is by having the cell phone sitting open on top of Brian's wallet, on one spot on top of the dishwasher in front of the bay window overlooking the lake, and by pushing the buttons gently, then changing it to speaker phone. There was a message from Byron about Benson. And there were several messages from Benson. He was beside himself with grief.
At about two a.m. that morning, Rascal had went to the basement to find him, walking totally stiff legged, and hardly breathing. He had gone to find Benson to say goodbye. Benson tried to help him. He desperately wanted to cure him. All he could do was demonstrate his love for his beloved cat to Rascal's very end.
Once we got Benson's messages we jumped right into action. We packed up, cleaned up our dishes, and were out of there! About fifteen minutes later Benson called again, Keaton (one of our "part time" kids) was driving him to the Emergency Pet Place up on such and such a street... maybe they could do something. Not long later he called again, Rascal had a heart murmur, his liver was a solid rock, and the Dr. didn't know if he'd make it another five minutes on his own. Benson was bawling, the tears were streaming down Brian's face, and I was striving ever so hard not to join them. I had a long bumpy car ride ahead of me and I knew my head would be challenged enough with that, let alone if I added crying to it.
The Dr. later commented on how he couldn't believe what a fighter Rascal was, and that we definitely had done something right with him. See, Rascal hung on till we got there, and his body responded as Brian talked to him and stroked him. Oh did the tears stream. I think he responded to me too, or maybe it's just hopeful thinking. He barely breathed, had a heart beat for about another five minutes, and then the Dr. said he was gone. It took awhile for the tears to slow enough for us to head home.
That evening Brent, with a small amount of assistance from Brian, constructed a casket. Of his own accord, Brent had removed his hat when we lowered Rascal into the casket. Brian and Benson dug a deep hole (Brandon is an assistant soccer coach and they had an evening away game), and through our tears, Rascal was lowered into the ground.
Brian summed it up perfectly - "Losing a family pet is just as painful as losing a human member of your family. Thankfully, it usually takes less time to start healing from the pain, but initially, there's just as much pain, grief, sorrow, the whole lot of it."
We literally thanked / thank the Lord for Rascal having been a part of our life's! He added a lot of joy, and laughter and LOVE!!!
(I got started on the kitchen yesterday, but the fresh turned soil in the back corner of the yard kept drawing my eyes and heart ... Benson had slept on the couch Monday night, and during the night when I'd come down to use the bathroom, there was no white and gray ball laying between his legs ... Benson is currently on a train headed for Byron and Cyndi's, per Cyndi's insistence and generosity.)
Yes, I fully realize that this is a very long posting. Rascal wasn't just a cat. He was very much a part of our lives! There are many other things I could have shared with you, and I just might some time. After all, we are printing postings off and keeping them in a book as a life record so to speak.
