"Hi, your beautiful cat visits us and our cats a lot. We wonder where his real home is.Could you please call us at ### ###-####. Thank you."
To understand how the Bird came to live with me you first need to understand Rosemount. Rosemount is my parent's house - the ancestral homelands, if you will - and it attracts cats. There is something about the wide porch and riotous gardens that says that it is a good place to come visit and perhaps to stay awhile. My mom's cat Gumpy was such a stray - turned up sleeping on the couch and so clearly bedraggled that he needed a home. Another grey cat who stayed for just a while had feline leukemia and had his people come to get him before he needed his next set of meds.
The Bird turned up one morning on the porch. As he had a collar - with a bell - and was clearly well fed and taken care of there were the clear admonishments from my mother to not interact with him. "Don't pat that Jingley Cat! He has a home." At other houses you just didn't have to feed stray cats but my mother knew, from experience, that the first step was not the feeding; it is the conversing. Once you talked to the cat it was downhill from there.
But the Bird continued to come around for a couple of days - "that Jingley Cat" became somewhat of a fixture. We even tried to find his people - put up posters and an add in the classifieds. To no avail. His original people could not be found and Bird had decided that he had new people so what exactly was our problem?
Birdy was allow to stay, Cat #5 at the time, on the condition that he leave with me when I moved out in six months. Which was fine with the Bird - he had already decided that I was his person.
He knew that something was going on when the boxes started appearing. My mom said that he was being extra nice to her - but she knew he was a fraud and was just worried I was leaving. The final straw for him was finding his chair (!) on the porch. He sat in there as all the boxes and furniture went by being completely unimpressed.
He settled after the move, and even forgave bringing a dastardly orange cat into the house. Patience, they name was Bird.
