Kitty cats

Before I met Sabine, my old roommate's cat, I went through a period where I really hated cats. I thought cats were sort of mean and unpredictable and I definitely wouldn't have thought that living with two cats would be acceptable. But my friend Carol had two cats, Max and Sabine, and we wanted to get an apartment together starting the summer before my junior year of college.

I decided to grin and bear it, but when we first moved into our apartment, I tried to avoid the cats at all costs. I was happiest when they stayed in Carol's room, but since they were indoor cats, they liked to roam around the whole apartment.

My friendship with Sabine started out slowly. I was home a lot more than Carol, so I had a lot of one-on-one time with the cats. She was all black and weighed about 19 pounds. If she were a human, she would have been a candidate for the stomach stapling surgery that Carnie Wilson is always going on about on talk shows. Anyhoo, Sabine would eat pretty much anything, but she especially liked yogurt. I eat a lot of yogurt, so I would give her the container after I was done with it. She was such a pig hog, that she would stuff her little cat face into the container to get the to the very bottom. Once, she got the container stuck to her face and was trying like the dickens to shake it off! I know, that sounds cruel, but I have to admit that it was pretty damn funny - kind of like "America's Funniest Pets". (I only let her suffer for about 2 seconds, so not to worry. Please don't call PETA on me.)

Sabine's other favorite past-time was to sit in Carol's palm plant pot and pull down the palm fronds to snack on them. She knew she wasn't supposed to do that, but she did it in such a lacadaysical manner that it was amusing. She would look straight at me and bite into another leaf, challenging me to swat her out of the plant pot. I never did...don't tell Carol.

Max was a pretty good cat, too. He was all orange and was rather thin. We thought maybe Sabine was eating his food. Max was more of a talker than Sabine. When Carol came home, he would sit on her lap and she would say, "Hello, Max!" and he would meow back. They would have long conversations and whenever Carol would finish a sentence, Max would meow.

I had a lot of spare time on my hands in college, so one day, I decided it would be fun to put a hat on Sabine and take her picture. It was around Halloween, and I had gone as the Cat in the Hat for Halloween, so I had the striped hat readily accessable. Carol had a red velvet rocking chair that Sabine liked to sit on, so I waited until she was comfortable and then I set the hat on her head and took her picture. The expression on her face in that picture is priceless. She looks like she's saying, "I will humor you for another five seconds, crazy lady, but if you don't remove this freakin' hat post haste, I will scratch your eyes out." We had a lot of precious moments like that.

Like I said, Sabine was one fat cat. One day, I was lying on the floor in the living room on the rug (I drank Schmidt Ice with regularity during this time in my life, so I was hung over a lot). Sabine would come to snuggle up to me and she wanted to sit on my chest. Awww, isn't the cute, right? Well, she was such a chubster, that 19 pounds of cat distributed over four paws was like balancing a chair on my chest - very heavy! (Not that I've ever tried that, but I imagine the feeling would be similar.)

The sweetest thing Sabine ever did was to comfort me when I wasn't feeling well. One day when I was studying for an Economics test, I had cramps so bad that I had to go home and go to bed. Sabine came in my room and curled up next to me and purred, and I didn't even have any food.

The summer after junior year, I got a phone call from Carol. She was crying so hard that I could barely understand what she was saying. I finally got that Sabine had died from liver failure. We thought it was due to her weight problem. Carol was devastated. I was shaken up, too. I sent Carol a Cat in the Hat sympathy card.

Carol still has Max and she has another cat now, too. But Sabine will always be my all time favorite cat. I think of her up in Kitty Heaven, sitting in a palm plant pot, licking a container of Yoplait yogurt and looking down at me, thinking, "I should have scratched that nutcase for dressing me up in an absurd hat when I had the chance."