Frisco

My sweet little kitty, Frisco, that I have had since I was 15 years old and a freshman in high school - 1989 - died this past weekend. She was almost 16 1/2 years old. She was a total sweetheart - one of the sweetest cats I have ever had (I would say its pretty close to a tie between her and little Willow). She had a great life and was just really old and had some problems - she had a tumor in her ear and had lost a good deal of weight in the last year. I'm sure that it is one of those things that it is for the best.

She had the tumor removed a few months ago and it most likely cancerous but they didn't test it. Anyway, it had grown back in recent weeks and she was very uncomfortable. Mom took her to the vet and they said they could let it go or operate but it would be like operating on an 85-90 year old person and she may not make it. My parents opted to have her put to sleep and thats fine. I would never have wanted her to suffer. She was a sweetheart though and I'm seriously going to miss her. Its going to be so weird now to walk into my parents' home and have there not be any pets of any kind. They're all gone now and I think my parents are done with that part of their lives. My dad is going to partially retire next year and then they're going to travel more so I don't blame them in the least, but its still going to be weird. I can't picture my house without a pet living there - at least a cat. At least I still have Willow and I plan to always have a cat myself.

The story of Frisco, and her brother Babe, is kind of an interesting one. It started one September afternoon in 1989 when my grandfather went down to the storage shed to look for something. He heard meowing and opened the side door and found six kittens. My grandfather always had a soft spot for cats - theirs, ours, strays that would show up on their doorstep - and went and got some cat food and milk and set it out in the shed for the mother cat. A day later, it hasn't been touched, the second day, still the same and at this point the kittens were getting very weak. One ended up dying. It was a little black one and it didn't seem quite "right" to begin with. I don't think it would have lived if the mother had been around. Six kittens is a fairly big litter anyway. They had their eyes open but I would guess them to be maybe around 11 days old. So we got eyedroppers and, milk - as we learned a day or so later, baby formula was the best to use - and started feeding them. It ended up being a little too late for one of the kittens who was a twin to our Frisco. She ate but then went to sleep on my mom's lap and didn't wake up. It was very sad - we were just a little bit too late. We saved four of them though and that is where the fun began.

We fed them, we played with them, we went down to my grandparents house every day to see them. They were our babies.

You're probably wondering now why I'm not saying we were keeping them or keeping Frisco or Babe or whatever but there is a little bit more to this story.

The cat that I had had since I was six years old had died in July of feline leukemia and it was horrible. One thing I have always said is that pets in the country tend to live very good lives but they also seem to die some bad deaths - and thats true. Anyway, I had been really torn up about it when he was sick and everything and it was a really bad time for me because I was so attached to him. My parents had raised me and my sister to believe that pets were special and they weren't to just be cast aside and replaced immediately when they were gone. But I remember my dad had told me when Puff died that I could have a kitten if I wanted one. I didn't want one - just because I didn't want one plus we still had Puff's brother Fluff (yes, I know, what names! but I was six and my sister was four when we named them!) and I wasn't sure he could deal with a kitten.

Anyway, as time went on we became more attached to the kittens and I was especially attached to Frisco. A stray had shown up at my grandparents' place before and had kittens and we had named them. We always named them fairly generic names since we wouldn't be keeping them and we did *sort of* the same with this litter. One of the black ones we called Blackie, the buff colored one was called Buffy, little Babe was originally called Bright Eyes because even as a kitten he had amazing eyes and Frisco my mom had started calling Frisky, but I didn't like it, I thought she needed a better name so I changed it *slightly* still thinking that we wouldn't be keeping any of them.

The time to give them away was approaching and I really really did not want to give her up but I really didn't know how to tell them that or ask them. They figured it out because they eventually pretty much told me we were keeping her, not asking me if I wanted to and thank goodness. So we took Frisco home with us - by this time knowing she was a girl and not a boy. Its kind of hard to tell when they're teeny tiny and I had given her a sort of masculine name thinking because she was so active and liked attacking the other kittens that she was a boy. Turned out, she was a girl... all of the others were boys - LOL! We tried "Frisca" for a while but I didn't really like it as much ... my mom sort of always ended up calling her that though. So the first night we had Frisk home we put her in a box in the laundry with this little Smurf doll that my sister had so she had something to cuddle with. She cried for the longest time - just like a baby. And I could hear her in there for the longest time and it was just breaking my heart. I wanted to go get her and bring her into my room but I knew she had to learn and eventually she must have gone to sleep. I don't think I heard her cry after that. Fluff was very good and accepting of her. He was amazing in fact. I don't think that any other cat we ever had would have accepted a kitten like he did - he was around 10 years old at the time too. Even Friso would not have been that accepting with a kitten as he was.

The other kittens ended up getting adopted out - Buffy went to a neighbor of ours and Blackie went to a little boy in town. All that was left was Bright Eyes (Babe). He was kind of a runt, real scrawny and he must not have been getting enough food because his fur was actually falling out. My grandparents decided that they would keep him. At the time, however, my grandparents were still doing a lot of travel all over the world and they were going on like a three week trip to South America. Mom knew that we would have to take care of Babe. So he came to live with us during this time - and there was no way he was going to go back after that. Mom started calling him her "baby" so his name for a while became Baby and then finally Babe which fit him oddly enough in a way I could never explain. Babe was something else - lets just say he was a unique individual for a cat.

And so we had for awhile three cats. Frisco and Fluff were really good friends. Babe just wanted to play with Fluff and Fluff just wasn't really up for it by that time. Fluff used to sit up on this stool and Babe would grab his super fluffy tail - it was hilarious. I like to think that somewhere Fluff is in heaven sitting on a cloud and Babe has him by the tail. And now Frisk is with them.

I'm doing OK, I'm just really going to miss her.