Opus 1; Finale: Finally, a Feline!

     To tell about my first cat, we need to jump ahead a few years, to my days in Miami, Florida.  I was attending the University of Miami School of Music for my Master's Degree and studying with the illustrious Dr. Lucas Drew, a fabulous teacher and Principal Bass of the Miami Philharmonic.  "What happened to college?" you may ask.  Well, we'll go back there later.  But since I changed my blog title to include the feline set, I thought a kitty story would be in order.

     For a time, while I was in  Miami, I had a boyfriend, John, who also played bass.  Our mutual friend, Joe, another bassist, was from  a small town near Daytona, Florida.  His folks still lived there, in a rural, sort of Everglades, swampy area.  They had a nice cabin, and John and I went one week to visit.  While we were there, we found a mother cat who was living under one of the other cottages with her litter of kittens.  She was very skittish, obviously feral and afraid of humans.   So were her kittens, except for one:  a pure white, little puff-ball with one green eye and one, blue.  He would come right up the steps (he couldn't have been more than 7 or 8 weeks old) and would meow pitifully for us to come out and feed him.  I got to be very fond of him over the next few days.  We asked around, and the cats didn't belong to anybody.  I decided to take the tiny, white kitten home with us.  We named him Nimbus, the little cloud.

     We got cat food, a kitty-leash and a small box to keep him in on the ride back to Miami.  He was remarkably at ease in the Jeep that John drove (and I mean an olive-drab, noisy Army Jeep.)  When we arrived at home, we fed him, showed him the litter box, and went to bed.

      The next morning, the little cutie was mewing like crazy to be fed.  But when I called him into the kitchen, he didn't come.  Now granted, I had not had a cat before, and did not know that they didn't necessarily come when called.  But later that day, a book fell down right next to Nimbus, and he didn't so much as blink.  We started making loud noises, to see if he would respond.  I began to think that Nimbus might be deaf.

      I called a veterinarian the next day and took him in for his shots and exam.  I asked the doctor if he thought Nimbus was deaf.  He told me that sometimes, white male cats with blue eyes can be deaf.  Since Nimbus had one green eye, he didn't know for sure.  The doctor then put his fingers to his lips and let out an ear-piercing whistle.  Nimbus didn't flinch.  "Yep, he's deaf," the vet announced.

     Having a deaf cat was not all that much different from having a hearing cat, I guess.  We couldn't let him outside by himself, of course, but I would take him on walks on a leash.  We also learned that if we stomped on the floor, he could feel the vibrations and would come.  He also liked to fetch pencils that we threw across the room.  When I flew up to Rochester to visit my folks, I took him on the plane, with me, and he was very well behaved.  He also got along quite nicely with our dog. And we discovered, I'm not sure how, that Nimbus liked to be vacuumed.  The noise certainly didn't scare him and he seemed to like the sensation of having his fur pulled on by the suction.  

     When I left the Miami area for Kansas City, I really couldn't take Nimbus with me.  My sister Amy, who lived on a farm in Ohio at the time , was happy to have him.  There he lived out his days with  her other cat, the two of them sleeping side-by-side on the water heater, the warmest spot in the house.