Why My Cat's Are Special - Spazz

Spazz came to me in October of 2001. He might have been about 2 months old. I had recently made the decision to start looking for another job. I looked at him as sort of a going away present. I carried him around in a basket for about the first two weeks I had him. When he wasn't in the basket or in my arms, he was acting crazy, hence the name. The city I worked for then (and work for again now) has this "Funfest" every year. It's like a big giant carnival. (Although this past year it was canceled) I loaded him up in his basket and I carried him around with me and people thought this most amusing and amazing that he would just sit in his basket and be carried around like that. Little did I know this was an early sign of the lazy boy he turned out to be.

Spazz ended up being a very calm cat. Yes, he has his moments of "spazzing out" but they are very rare, yet so very funny. Imagine a 30 pound cat jumping around and playing. How is that NOT funny? He has tolerated 4 different kittens being brought into his home. With each one he lets them cuddle and play with him and he quickly becomes a big brother to them. He loves attention and is very verbal about wanting it. (The cartoon video at the bottom of this page reminds me very much of him. Including the scratched mattress.) But he's also very content passing out pretty much anywhere he happens to get tired, which is often. His favorite place is, of course, the stove in the living room. Before we moved here, though, his favorite place was my backyard. It was fenced in with a privacy fence and he was always too fat to make any attempt at jumping over it. But...

He made two escapes in the time he spent back there. The first one, he ended up in the neighbor's back yard under their bushes. The only way he got over there is by jumping up on the big green electrical box that was in our back yard and the only reason I think he actually went over is because he was chasing a stray cat, who was much more agile then him. I didn't know my neighbors very well. A wave here or there, but that's about it. The only access to their backyard was through the house. First of all, how stupid is that? I called them the screaming kid family because... well... the kids were constantly screaming. So Spazz jumps the fence, gets stuck back there because there is no big green electrical box on the other side of the fence and the screaming kids found him and terrified him to the point he hid under this gigantic row of bushes and was in some kind of shock because when I went over there to get him (having had to tramp through their home which was extremely uncomfortable) he would not respond to me at all. He was staring off into some cat world and it was like his eyes were open, but he wasn't at home. The oldest screamy kid went behind the bushes and was able to roll him out towards me far enough where I could get a hold of him. (seriously... he was rolled out of the bushes with that blank stare going on the whole time) After he was in my arms, it was then I found out that the husband was severely allergic to cats. Which meant I couldn't go tramping back through their home with Spazz. Luckily my son had come out to make sure we got Spazz out okay and I was able to half toss, half gently hand Spazz over the fence to my son.

The second time he got out, he escaped through our back gate. My kids had some friends over and they were swimming and going in and out of the gate and it was left open. And he took off on the adventure of his life, I'm sure. We couldn't find him that night and I left the gate open hoping he would come back. He didn't. We made fliers and put them up around the neighborhood. A week went by and I checked the local animal shelter and placed a flier in their facility. We drove the neighborhood, we walked the neighborhood, but he was gone. I worried about how he was getting along, if someone had him, if he had been hurt, if he was scared, lonely, or crying for me. I called the shelter for about two weeks straight. They would update a recording about the day's finds and describe the animal they picked up. Nothing. After about two weeks, I pretty much gave up hope. About a month later, I was having a bad day at work and I started thinking about Spazz and I swear I could feel him calling me. He was scared and he was sad. After about 30 minutes of this nagging on me, I picked up the phone and dialed the shelter. I don't remember all the animals that were listed, but somewhere in the mix they described a gray and white neutered male short hair that they had picked up the previous day. No other description but that. And I wondered... and I called, but couldn't get any better description. I asked if he was a fat cat, but they said he was kind of big, but not really. So I took my lunch at work and left to run up to the shelter to see if maybe, by some miracle, it was him. I didn't hold out much hope, but I had to know for sure. Low and behold, when they took me to the back, there he was. Ten pounds lighter, scared and sad, but fine, after a month's time. I burst into tears and picked him up and he wrapped his arms around me (okay, not really "around" me) and laid his head on my shoulder and I drove with him that way the whole way home. He was never let out, unsupervised, again.