Pam’s Pictorama Post: Oh the poor rejected lover kitty! His beloved caroling away with her paramour. So sad! Is she truly fickle? Did they etch their initials together previously in this tree trunk? Or are those the initials of the lovers he he walking by? Or was the affection all on his side? It was not meant to be.

Our third wheel is in a strange stance – partial fight and somewhat flight as the bottom half of him already seems to be walking away while the top half looks back. He wears a nice bow, unlike the singing lover, although Miss Kitty has a red collar on. The cat couple only have eyes for each other so they don’t even see him behind the tree – alas. I’m fairly sure that the toad stools growing at the base of the tree are symbolic. (Danger, poison and no less than Existential Dread according to the internet.)

This card has an embossed quality and was never mailed, nothing is written on the back. It was produced by Souvenir Postcards of New York and Berlin. I assume it was riding the crest of the Wain-esque cat craze of the post-Victorian era. Although anthropomorphic like his these cats are less pointedly satirical. Not sure who you’d send this card to where they wouldn’t feel like you were making some sort of point or message.

This card points to the whisp-o-will nature of cat affection and, shall we say, coupling of felines. I have limited personal experience of this beyond one cat, Winkie, that managed to evade our window of spaying post-adoption slip out and find a tabby with whom she had a brief liaison resulting in four kittens.

In retrospect, it is hard to associate those kittens with her as she made short shrift of her affiliation with them. We kept them, two gray, a tabby and a orange tiger. They became: Ping and Pong, Tigger, and Squash. Ping was a smart female and Pong a (very) dopey male. Tigger was a nice and very pretty tabby who sadly wandered off, was found once and did it again. (Our cats were free range in those days.)

Meanwhile Squash turned out to be a pale long drink of an orange cat – so long it was like he had an extra vertebrae or two. As a result would often sit on his haunches, like a human on the couch or in an armchair, comfortably bent completely in two. (My brother Edward once declared of Squash, Survives but never thrives, which seemed pointedly accurate. I have to admit that I have no memory of when Squash passed out of our lives as I wasn’t living home at the time but neither do I remember the report.)

Squash was in most other ways a rather undistinguished fellow living quietly in a multitude of cat personalities. (The kitten event had swelled the family total to unforeseen highs!) However, his distinguishing characteristic was his affection for one of the other cats. He was the rare cat in that house who would seek out another and sleep with his arms around him.

Peaches, one of the Jersey Five of cats, hates everyone (man and beast) it would seem, except the elderly cat Milty. She stealthily climbs up on a chair and curls up asleep with him. Milty, whose precise age is not known to me but a rough calculation has around 20, is largely the benevolent figurehead of senior male in that house. He likes to have a brief go at every dish of food as it is put down but otherwise he’s pretty chill.

Meanwhile, the role of senior cat largely belongs to the four year old enormous all black male, Beauregard or Beau. That said Blackie, of the visiting New York cats, believes himself to be senior cat when we are in NJ. Beau will take a certain amount of that since B doesn’t eat with them which would probably cause the imminent collapse of that small kingdom.

There are occasional blow ups and one took place last summer while I was on a call with the two Board Chairs from work. That said, if you are going to have a cat fight explosion while on an important work call its good that you work for an animal hospital. They are very forgiving about animal interruptions on zoom.

Going back to Winkie, who was a very smart little polydactyl calico cat. Having produced said kittens (in my parent’s closet, the carpet was never quite the same) and caring for them a scant amount of time she pretended that she had no memory of them nor where they came from and generally treated them with a superior attitude and disgust as interlopers we’d wished on her one day. Such is the attitude of cats.