Some years ago I wrote a sardonic series of posts tagged cat-a-log. I won’t delve too deeply into that here, but suffice it to say that we had come into a lot of cats, and I was not very happy about it. In my resentment, I wanted nothing to do with any of them. Most took the hint and steered well clear of me, one of them did not.
Thumper was day 8 of the Cat-a-log.
It did not matter how consistently I ignored him. Or how many times I chased him off. He was utterly relentless. It was as if he had —for whatever reason— decided I was his person, and the matter was settled. I don’t know how long it took (it was a while), but eventually he pried the stick out of my butt, and over the years he and I would spend a lot of time together.
For years he worked to be near me, pressed right up against if he could. Years of conversations. I’ll never know what it was he thought he was saying, but he was always animated, interactive, and made eye contact throughout. Years of plopping down and rolling onto his back in front of me. If you reached down to rub his exposed belly, he’d attack, but then that was why he’d rolled onto his back in the first place. For sixteen years he was a companion and a friend, and now he’s gone, and I’m gutted.
Goodbye Thumper, you will be missed.