Friday Flashback

When I was fourteen my sister Sarah (who is six years older) and I brought home a nine month old Abyssinian kitten.  Sarah had read about some kittens that would be available at a local cat show and dragged me along as her hapless accomplice.  I was very excited, but worried that we were going to get in big trouble for doing this without our parents knowing about it.  At the show she met a breeder from Virginia and selected a female kitten named Fanny Bryce Spartacus II.  Quite a mouthful for the tiny-boned, delicate creature that she was.  In the car home we renamed her Abby, which is a short form for the breed (Aby).

Abby came from a busy cattery, we never saw this cattery so we don’t know what it was like but she was VERY skittish and tense for a very long time.  After about a year though she settled in and became the most fantastic cat; highly intelligent, affectionate, loyal and so very beautiful.   She was also remarkably slender considering she was a complete glutton and thief of any food she could her paws on.  Perhaps there were a lot of cats around during her early months and maybe she didn’t get enough to eat, but you name it and she tried to steal it; bread, cheese, nuts, cereal, meringues, carrots, nothing was safe, our butter always had lick marks on it even if it was only left on the table for a minute or two.
  

My mum and I were out for lunch today and she was asking after my cats, in particular how our newcomer Jimmy was doing.  I said Jimmy was highly food motivated and regularly surfed the counters, much to my chagrin.  On Christmas day my family was witness to Jimmy’s extreme interest in some shrimps we had out on the coffee table which had to be guarded.  This was caught on camera http://cats--devcats-catrina.blogspot.com/2011/01/wordless-wednesday.html.  My mum said “He’s a thief just like Abby” and I replied “Do you remember the time she tried to steal a pie?”  I'm not kidding, an entire pie!  We heard a huge clatter in the kitchen one day and Abby, a five pound cat had tried to make off with a pie which probably weighed as much as she did, that my mum had on a cooling rack.  Everything ended up on the floor…luckily face up!  We laughed and talked fondly about her antics as if it were yesterday but actually more than twenty-five years have passed since she went to the bridge.  Our beloved Abby died at age seven of a massive tumor in her chest.

PLEASE NOTE:  Unfortunately I have no pictures of Abby as she lived in a time well before digital cameras. The Abyssinian pictures I have used here came from a google search and were the closest representation of what she looked like that I could find.

PS - I do not endorse buying cats and prefer to rescue cats in need, but my sister is her own person and has the right to do as she wishes :-)