The Ballad of Bill the Cat

I had been meaning to post about my friend Bill here for a while, then kind of forgot my intention as life got busy. Better late than never. Let me tell you the story of my friend Bill the Cat.

Bill was a stray who hung around outside our house the last couple of months. When we first met him, he was terribly scrawny and beat up, but completely tame and very sociable. He would follow me and Derek around our daily tour of the garden after work, rubbing up against our ankles and purring. After a day or two of this, well, we had to give him a name, and Derek thought to call him Bill, as in Bill the Cat of Bloom County. (He'd put on some weight and the scratch on his face had healed by the time I took this picture. It was quite a suitable moniker on first acquaintance.)

A couple of days after we first met, I caught him trying to eat a dead, maggoty bird on the ground. At that point I took pity on him and started feeding him daily, as he was clearly starving. (Besides, once you name a cat, you kind of become responsible for it.) I'd guess he's maybe a year or two old; I got the sense he may have been someone's pet who got "dropped off in the country" when he outgrew cute kittenhood and developed a rather distinctive (some might say annoying) adult meowy voice. Anyway, when we gave him that bowl of cat food and bowl of water, he became our friend. He lived under and on our porch outside. He never wandered far, and would greet us every morning as we left for work and every afternoon when we returned, begging for attention and food, and purring very loudly whenever he got what he wanted.

Despite lingering grief over Spot, and reluctance to take on any more vet bills, Derek and I did briefly consider adopting him, but Joey made his feelings clear on the subject: NO WAY. He would hiss and bite my ankles when he smelled Bill on my pantlegs. It's too bad; Bill didn't return Joey's aggression at all, and from his side of the screen door he seemed to want to be friends with Joey. Of course Tisha would not have appreciated the disruption either. In any case, sweet as he is, he just couldn't replace Spot in our hearts or our lives, so we made a decision to find him a home. After a particularly cool night that reminded me of the autumn (and winter) to come, I posted an ad with his picture on the e-bulletin board at work, and to my great delight, found him a home last week. The couple came by on Saturday to pick him up. He was absolutely frantic when he got put in the cat carrier, but I knew it was for the best.

Still, I miss him a little. I did get the nicest email from my coworker yesterday, though, updating me on his adjustment to his new home. She told me he purred so much at the vet's office that he charmed all of the staff, and the vet couldn't really hear his heart over that loud motor! What really got me, though, was when she wrote that he had "slept in his little bed." That image just warms me through and through. Fare thee well, Bill the Cat. May you live long and warm in your new home with your new friends. Though you may have already forgotten us (cats aren't particularly known for their long-term memories), we won't soon forget how you brightened our days after our beloved Spot left us.