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A kitty at my apartment building ran up to me as I was carrying some bags of groceries up the stairs yesterday. She made some cooing sounds and followed me to my door.

I took some ½ & ½ out to her in a little conatiner and she ran right up to it and started lapping it up. After she finished, she disappeared but I have seen her once before hanging around the building.

I plan to get four or five small containers of kitty food, just in case something like this happens again. I hope no one dumped the poor little thing. She seemed to know how to get what she needed, though.

Sounds like the ginger Tom who occasionally visits when I’m working in the 1850 house. Thought he was a stray, but the last two times he hasn’t finished his can of Moroccan Sardines and hasn’t even swung back by where I’m working to sit and observe and say thank you.

So he’s neither terribly hungry or truly lonely.
Which is good really, there are too many wild domestic critters out in East Texas and it breaks my heart.

Years ago when we had just come back to the States from our life in Japan, we resided in a little second-floor apartment in Atlanta with a big, surly, odd-eyed white Turkish cat named Anton. One day on her walk from the car to the apartment stairs, Mrs. Vegetable encountered a very friendly stray cat who loved all the petting, and started to run to her whenever he saw her. Naturally, she, soft hearted girl, started to feed him. As a side note, the Japanese name for stray cat is “nora neko”. ‘Stray’ was not in Mrs. V’s vocabulary so, as we all do when bouncing around trying to communicate in a foreign tongue, she substituted a word she knew for the unknown ‘stray’ and so he became “Missing Cat” – a name I rather liked and so immediately adopted without so much as a grammarian’s “tut-tut-but”. Wisely, she tried to keep her affair with Missing Cat a secret from Anton, the terrible wild-eyed (one gold and one blue)Turk who by rights had first claim to her affection…and her cat food. So it was strictly an outdoor fling thing with Missing Cat – her wild cat on the side, and these encounters went on for more than a month: daily hot and heavy-petting parking lot trysts.

However, as happens in so many secret affairs, there came a a bitter discovery by Anton of her ‘infeedelity’ with Missing Cat. I was there to witness it. Our apartment had a big living room window with a view… of the sidewalk in front of our apartment. Anticipating her schedule as hungry cats can do, Anton was at that window, and looking down and saw her petting an feeding another cat!. He made an anguished cry and ran to the apartment door to meet her; when she came in he sniffed her legs which carried the scent of his rival where who had so amorously rubbed against her….and, injured lover, Antonbit her leg, and hard! For a month afterwards, he would always sniff her when she came home, bitter and suspicious, with the occasional nip just to remind her of what could happen if he caught her messing around again. There was no pet divorce in those days, and besides, he couldn’t open the door to leave her.

This scrutiny (and fear of getting bitten again by a cat who was an experienced and infamous biter anyhow) put a damper on things with Mrs. V and eventually Missing Cat went on to seek the affections, and cat food, of some other woman. He may be out there still, so if you see a very old but charming cat who wants to rub your leg, go into the affair with the knowledge of what happened to another who went astray…

What is this “cat” of which you speak?