Raisinette and Mellow Fellow

In the last post, you learned how we came to own a weimaraner pup. But let's go back in time and meet the rest of her pack.

When Kurt and I moved in together, I knew we were going to get a kitten. It had been many years since I had a cat around the house, and it literally, physically hurt. I needed to have one sitting on me, lying on my chest, purring, kneading, doing kitty things. It's in my blood (yeah, yeah, Crazy Cat Lady is in my future).

We weren’t planning on getting a fancy cat; all the ones from my childhood were dubbed “alley cats” that we either bought for ten bucks from crappy pet shops or took from friends. AND we wanted only a male, because females were mean (or so I'd heard). One random afternoon in February, almost eleven years ago, we went to a huge cat show. We saw the typical breeds--Persians, Maine Coons, Burmese, Siamese. Then we came across a table with the strangest-looking creatures--they had soft, wavy fur close to their bodies, wedge-shaped heads, gigantic ears, long, long limbs, and features seemingly sculpted after Egyptian cat statues.

"What the hell are those?" I asked Kurt. He was equally repelled and fascinated , so we approached the breeder.

"These--" she began proudly, holding up a calico one--"are Cornish Rex."

She allowed us to pet and hold a few of the cats, which came in an astonishing array of colors. The fur was exquisite to the touch, like crushed velvet. The cats, for all the bustle and noise of the crowd, hardly seemed bothered and let us handle them. The breeder handed us her card and told us that she was expecting a litter in April if we were interested.

We were.

In case you are unfamiliar with the Cornish Rex, allow me to enlighten you. The breed originated in Cornwall in the 50’s, when a barn cat delivered an odd, curly-haired baby. The owner decided to breed the mutated kitty back to its mother, and lo and behold, the Cornish Rex was born. There was apparently a lot of refining and crossing with other breeds like British Shorthairs. The Cornish Rex made it to American shores in 1957, where more refining was done with Oriental Shorthairs and Siamese. The result is a beautifully-bizarre cat with sharp angles, smooth fur, gnarled little whiskers, gigantic eyes, bald pointy ears, back legs longer than the forelegs (the American Cornish Rexes have a torso that is said to be the kitty equivalent to the greyhound). Their temperament is manically friendly—they want to be with you all the time. They are playful well into adulthood, affectionate, run and leap like Olympic gymnasts, and—no lie-are extremely talkative. No, just because they are missing most of their hair does not make them hypoallergenic, although they don’t shed much and they don’t produce as much dander as their full-haired brothers and sisters. Yes, they look weird and totally take you by surprise when you first meet them.

It was an odd experience, ordering a cat the way you might order a pizza: one male, blue-point if possible. Keep in mind I was still operating under the impression that female cats were insane, that they went into heat and shredded your body with their claws, that they avoided any sort of loving touch and instead wanted to rip off your face. Our male cat was due to be born in April; after a couple months, we could go to the breeder’s place and meet him; in August we could pick him up and take him home.

The breeder, “Diane,” lived in St. Charles, a lovely western suburb of Chicago that seemed to take three million years to reach. Finally we turned down a winding road and stopped at a long , low ranch set on an acre of wooded property. We parked, and as we walked up the front sidewalk, a little wedge-head popped up in a side window. Diane let us in and walked us through the kitchen, where we passed approximately fifteen Cornish Rex lounging in various areas—along the back of the kitchen sink, hanging from the spice rack, lying on a floor rug, etc.

Diane told us to have a seat at her sturdy dining room table. We watched as she moved to the couch, leaned over, and scooped up an armful of kittens. After she dropped the first furry batch onto the tabletop, she went back to the couch for another armful. Soon the table was swarming with multicolored kittens, all of them friendly, all of them full of piss and vinegar.

I was delighted and a little startled. I’d never seen so many felines, let alone so many goofy-looking felines , all in one place. I reached out to pet the warm little curly bodies, getting acquainted.

“We had three blues,” Diane told us, from her seat at the head of the table. “But we decided to keep the male for breeding purposes. The other two are females.”

She reached over the moving mass of fur to point at two blue-point kittens who had plopped down for a nap. They were lovely, but—they were female.

“And then we have Mel, that’s short for Mellow Fellow,” Diane continued. I shifted the large mama cat who had launched herself into my arms and looked to where Diane pointed. In the center of the table sat a cream and white kitten, ears too big for its little head, one eye squeezed shut, the other open wide to reveal a copper colored iris.

“He’s a sweet boy but he has a big mouth, just like his papa.”

Our attention was diverted by a tiny black kitten who ran up on little horse legs to Kurt. She stretched out her neck to sniff Kurt’s mouth, then she climbed up onto his shoulder.

“And that’s Raisinette. She’s only two pounds, the runt.”

Raisinette started to lick the back of Kurt’s ear. When Kurt gently pushed her away, she climbed to his other shoulder and went to work on that ear. Some deep desire made me reach out and take the tiny kitten off Kurt. I curled her up in my arms like a newborn, and she blinked up at me, eyes golden and enormous.

This is the one, I thought. But NO! SHE’S FEMALE!

We ended our visit with promises to be in touch, and then the great debate over which kitten to take ensued. Looking back on it, I realize that my decision had already been made—I was in love with the scrawny black female, and I knew we would get her.

As it turned out, Raisinette was Diane’s favorite. The breeder was close to tears as she gave the kitten a final kiss and handed her over. Gripped by a wild impulse, I decided to take Mellow Fellow too, to keep the baby company.

By now, I’m sure you realize their names did not stay Raisinette and Mellow Fellow,which, let's face it, were pretty stupid. Almost immediately they showed their personalities and pretty much named themselves. To this day, whatever Lola wants, Lola gets, and the cat with the copper eyes never shuts up; he never pipes down; he is Piper.

Those rumors about females? They turn out to be true—to a degree. More on that later.

Works Cited:
Fogle, DVM, Dr. Bruce. The New Encyclopedia of the Cat. New York: DK Publishing, Inc., 1997.

Fate

On our first date, my husband took me to lunch at Lone Star, located in a strip mall not far from the printing company where we both worked. Over Bubba Burgers and peanuts, we talked about animals--how he used to get attacked by bloodthirsty chickens on his aunt and uncle's farm, the cats I had growing up, his brothers' many dogs.

The mention of dogs reminded me of something. "The other day," I said, "I was killing time in the pet store and saw the prettiest little puppy. It was all gray, with floppy ears, and it had bright blue eyes."

"Oh, sure," Kurt said. "That's a weimaraner."

"A weima-what?"

"A weimaraner. A German hunting dog."

To me, the name sounded like some sort of disgusting sausage that I would never consume, and when the waitress asked us if we wanted dessert, I forgot all about the little puppy with bright blue eyes.

Three years later, Kurt and I were living in a ramshackle four-bedroom house in a suburb 13 miles west of Chicago. My life was about to drastically change; I was quitting my seven-year- long job as a receptionist at the printing company in favor of teaching and finishing grad school. We were the proud owners of two Cornish Rex cats named Lola and Piper (more on them later). I had only a few weeks before my tenure with the printing company was over. My evenings should have been spent reading, writing, preparing to teach my very first college class. So what did I do instead?

I went to the pet store one afternoon on my lunch hour. There, in the bottom left-hand glass-fronted cage, was a little gray puppy with floppy ears. I moved closer and squatted down. The puppy lifted its head from its front paws and surveyed me with serious, sad, bright blue eyes. My gaze traveled to the handprinted sign taped next to the cage: "Weimaraner, female, $750."

"Would you like to hold her?" asked a teenaged worker, and I found myself nodding yes.

Within seconds I had this stinky little puppy in my arms. I walked over to the walled-in "play" area and set her on the ground. She looked at me with those sad eyes and sighed. That's odd, I thought. Having been raised with cats all my life, I knew nothing about the habits and mannerisms of the canine, but it seemed to me a ten-week-old puppy should be leaping around, running wild, peeing on everything and chewing its baby teeth off.

This puppy was content to sit in my lap and hide her long nose in between her paws.

I knew my lunch hour was nearly up, so I stood with the puppy and tried to hand her back to the pet store worker.

The puppy made a strange sound, a cross between a whine and a squeak through her nose. That sound pierced my heart. Suddenly I knew there was no way I could let this sad little creature get stuffed back up into a glass cage, where she was forced to poop and sleep in the same place.

I called Kurt.

When he walked into the store, I thrust the puppy (that I refused to put down for a half an hour) into his arms. I could tell instantly by the soft look in his eyes that he was smitten. We spent a few minutes asking each other, "Should we get her?" "I don't know, should we?" Everything happened at the speed of light, and the next thing we knew (and a boatload of money later), we were the new owners of a ten-week old weimaraner puppy.

She made no noise the whole ride home, which she spent on Kurt's lap. We set her down on the carpet in the living room, and the first thing she did was run up to our male cat, Piper. (This was the one and only time I've ever seen Piper hiss.) Lola went to high ground and watched this new thing with her body lowered and her eyes narrowed. The puppy, unconcerned by the cats' reactions, fell to chewing the wooden handle of the recliner.

She was a supremely quiet puppy. In fact, she didn't make a sound that whole night until I was washing her bowls at the kitchen sink. Then she waddled over to me, looked up, and made that strange sound again, the whine-squeak that seemed to emanate from her nose. I gave her a bowl of water which she lapped up, and then we began the serious business of naming her.

We thought about "Libby." I wanted "Daphne." Kurt wanted Bette Page or some other sort of nonsense. How we landed on "Cassie" I will never know, but the name instantly embodied everything about her.

Looking back, we now know Cassie most likely came from a puppy mill, or a disreputable breeder who sold her to a pet store for some unknown reason. Would we purchase an animal from a pet store again? Not on your life. Are we glad we purchased Cassie from a pet store, and saved her from some sort of unimaginable fate? You bet.

That night, we set Cassie's little crate up in the kitchen with a pillow and blanket. We snapped on a night light. We said goodnight, shut off the lights, and headed upstairs to our bedroom. That's when our quiet, serious little puppy let out an ungodly shriek the likes of which I'd never heard. The shrieking and howling and screaming went on and on, until I was sure my brain would melt.

I had no idea what to do.

Kurt, being more schooled in dogs than I, brought Cassie's crate into the living room, beside the couch, and opened up the top so he could reach a hand inside to touch her. She quieted. He stayed on the couch all night, one arm shoved into the cage, hand resting on the warm, fat body of the new baby in the house.

She slept. We didn't. And it was only the beginning.