How To Name A Cat

We lived in a too small house.  A house built for two and we were more.  I needed an office space that I didn’t have to rent. 

My publishing business could be run as easily from a home office as from the office space it was currently in.  All I needed was space to put the equipment; computers, printers, copier, light table, files and more files.  But we lived in a too small house.

We found a house.  A big house.  An old house.  A house with a basement room with an outside door.  An office space where my sales staff could come and go without interrupting life in the home.  We bought the house.

The house was Victorian architecture built with huge, red, Colorado sandstone in 1890.  Although it was now in Des Moines, at the time it was built newspaper stories about it wondered, “Why would anyone want to live so far outside the city.”  Although it was no longer surrounded by fields and forests, we soon discovered that there was wild creatures who wanted to share our home.  Mice.

We need a cat.  A tom cat.  An old cat.  A cat wise in the ways of mice.  We need a cat.  We need a hunter.  A slayer of mice.

Having overheard that I wanted a cat, our daughter, knowing of a person who raised cats, brought us two female kittens in a cage.  A cage in which they’d lived most of their lives.  In a cage that they were to afraid to leave.  Two scaredy cats.  Two kittens ignorant of mice and their ways.  Kittens.  Not cats.  Not what I wanted, but I couldn’t send them back to that pet mill from which they came.

Names.  They needed names.  I don’t really know why people give names to cats.  Cats seldom come when you call their names.  They may come when you say, “Kitty, Kitty, Kitty” and have food for them.  Or they may just lift their head from where they lay curled in the sun, and stare at you with the most dismissive of looks.  But we feel the need to name them.  It is our God given duty to name the animals.  Read Genesis chapter two and verses nineteen and twenty, if you don’t believe me.  Names.  They needed names.

The black cat was easy to name.  Aren’t all black cats named Midnight?  The gray tabby cat … what to name the gray tabby?  Something to match her personality.  Crazy Cat?  Kitty Retardo?  Skittish Kittish?

It happened when my son and I were sitting at the table in the kitchen.  The kitchen was one of only three rooms in the house without carpeting.  The other two being bathrooms.   So, there we were sitting and pondering names.  That was when the gray tabby made and entrance.  I don’t mean to say that she came into the room.  I mean to say that she made an entrance.  And it was an entrance that we recognized.  We had seen that entrance many times.   On TV.  On Seinfeld.  The kitten came sliding sideways into the kitchen and then did a little twitch and looked at us expectantly.  Kramer!  It was obvious that this kitten’s name was Kramer.