A Tale of Two Kitties

It amazes me how mere familiarity can create such a powerful illusion of understanding.  Hang around someone for long enough, and eventually the brain relaxes its curiosity and says, "I know what this guy is all about".   As a scientist, I choose to believe in a certain degree of Absolute Truth with regards to the physical world and its properties.  Without this assumption, empiricism as we know it has no foothold.  But where conscious beings are concerned, my data support a much more relativistic view.  I am inclined to believe that each of us contains an entire universe of perceptions and interpretations whose sum is completely unique.  And each being's universe is far too vast, too complex and mysterious for any outside observer to ever fully quantify.

Which brings us to the cat.  I think of Lysander as a pretty simple guy--motivated by food first and play second--but sixteen years into our relationship he continues to surprise and confound my expectations regarding his behavior.  For the first 10 years of his adult life he refused to sit in anyone's lap; then, one day, he decided he was a lap cat.  I give him Bob's leftover oatmeal and he snubs it, but a bag of uncooked oatmeal left on the kitchen counter isn't safe for five minutes. 

Mr. Mystery.

Half the reason that Lysander left my mom's house and came to live with me in Eugene was that he didn't get along with the other cats.  (The other half was that I missed having a cat.  The OTHER other half was that he didn't really get along with my mom, either.)  He bullied our female Siamese mix and fled from our tuxedo tomcat; even the foster kittens who occasionally breached their containment in the spare bathroom filled him with horror.  After moving in with me Ly became much friendlier with new people, but still chased all feline visitors out of the yard with hissing and growling.

Until Princess.

Princess and Mama Cat were here when George and Theresa bought this property (lending new meaning to the real estate term "fully furnished").  After a year and a half of surviving on their own they were very wild and fearful, and the Catlins spent almost that long slowly coaxing them into petting proximity.  Now Princess is about as shy as Liza Minelli, and twice as eager to impress you with her antics. 

Lysander and Mama Cat are long-lost twins, right down to the eyeliner and ear tufts.

Lysander first met the ladies soon after we moved here.  Before we got his cat yard enclosed, I took him on supervised walks around the property to keep him from driving us crazy.  I assumed that he would take his usual aggressive stance against Mama C. and Princess, and I tried to discourage him away from their main territory on the front porch of the Catlins' house.  Naturally, that was the one place he wanted to go.  To my surprise, he and Mama ignored each other utterly.  Princess the Extrovert ran up to him at full gallop and started sniffing his face, and to my greater surprise, Ly just backed up a little and let it happen.  After a few more bafflingly peaceable encounters I realized that the scuffle I had dreaded just wasn't happening, and stopped worrying about monitoring Ly's proximity to the other stripey citizens of the community.

As Bob & I considered the possibility of being evacuated during the Carstens wildfire last month, I suddenly had reason to wonder how the three cats might get along in closer quarters.  More specifically, if confined to the 160 square feet of the motorhome for an indefinite period in an RV park somewhere.  Rather than allowing me to wallow in theoretical uncertainty, Princess grasped empiricism by the horns and decided that she should pay a visit to Lysander's home turf.

How do you work this thing?  The Magic Mesh™ screen door presented serious logistical challenges.

Once inside, the brazen Goldilocks made herself right at home.  She licked the food bowl.  She jumped up on the couch and sat in my lap.  She tried out all the good cat perches.  The rightful homeowner watched closely, but showed no reaction.  Bob and I watched in amazement.

Ly scopes out Princess scoping out Ly's window seat.

Since then, Princess has become a semi-regular visitor to the motorhome.  She'll follow one of us back here from the yard, or just drift in while we're watching a movie.  She greets Ly by rubbing up against his face, then goes about her own business of snooping, lounging, or battling my flip flops.  Lysander enjoys the occasional bat at her tail as it passes under his perch, but otherwise sticks to his own routine.  It reminds me of the "parallel play" that toddlers engage in when they're still too little for sustained interaction with each other. 

A meeting of the stripes.

We've theorized ourselves silly about this apparent shift in Ly's response to other cats.  Is it Princess' smell?  A sense of solidarity in stripiness?  Did meeting Princess and Mama Cat on their turf first make a difference?  Is Lysander just mellowing in his old age?  The answer to all these questions, of course, is that we'll never know.  Our canon of knowledge on the fuzziest member of the family has been shaken yet again, reminding us to keep the Assumption dial turned low and the Observation dial cranked up.