Cat of the Month: Tigger

In the limited series of Minnesota Cats, today’s Cat of the Month is ...da dut dada!...Tigger!
Ah, yah, a tiger-striped cat. Don’t look at me; I didn’t name him. Not an orange one, though. Brown-black-grey.
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One fine day Mom & Dad went down to the pound, because ours was a house that could not go catless for long. Mom couldn’t make up her mind - or I think it was Mom; I wasn’t there. I had to work or study or go on a date or something; it may have been Dad - so they came home with two cats. Two cats are better than one! Especially if you plan to keep them inside all the time because you’re tired of cats going out forever.
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Tigger was the sidekick cat. Casper gets to be Cat of the Month in November so more on him then.
Tigger was cool. Nothing perturbed Tigger. You could sling him over your shoulder, use him for a scarf. Put him in ridiculous positions. Knock him off the bed in your sleep. Best, you could reposition him on your lap when you had to reach for the remote, or your foot was falling asleep. Most cats won’t let you do that. They get all huffy you’re disturbing them and go off. Only to be back in 10 minutes to put your other foot to sleep. My current cat Natalie will even growl and smack me if I try to wiggle life back into a toe.
And he ate everything. He wasn’t a fat cat by any means, nor particularly large. But he weighed a ton. You go up to an ordinary-looking cat, expecting maybe 12 pounds, and wrench your shoulder out of joint because this guy was made of lead or something. So we called him Iron Guts, for the density.
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The big flaw with Tigger was his shyness. He’d hide if strangers came around, didn’t like the limelight. So when the house caught fire, the two cats ran out of the basement to escape the flames. The whole neighborhood was gathered around in the street, though, and Tigger was so afraid of all those people, he ran back inside.
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And that was it for living at home. We moved into temporary lodgings, and I moved from there into my first student apartment, closing two decades of sharing the family house. From now on, all cats would be my personal responsibility.

Bye, Tigger!