For months Mom has been telling me to get my butt in gear. In fact she has put it a little more rude than that.
I kept telling her that nothing interesting ever happened in this house, that I hated her and that she wasn't even my real Mom (I totally stole that from a
meme). Sometimes it is fun to throw a puberty tantrum without having the actual ordeals of puberty to go through.
Now Mom has been nominated on Facebook to share a cat picture each day for five days and she went into memory mode once again and told me Mim's story.
Dude had just moved in a few months ago when Mom and Dad decided he shouldn't be alone all day. So they went to the shelter to have a look at cats.
At first they fell in love with two cats they couldn't take home. Micky was 18. His Dad had died and so Micky, a skinny tabby cat, ended up at the shelter. Mom's heart started bleeding right away, but Micky had been a single cat all his life (no worries, he did get adopted later!). Then there was a beautiful blue cat boy with white markings, but he was FeLV positive, so they weren't allowed to take him, either.
They told the lady that Dude had had problems with territorial cats and that they'd like to take in an older, calm cat. The lady said she had a seven year old girl that could be just the one.
Mom and Dad slept over it and then came back to pick Randy up a few days later.
When they came to the shelter's office to pay the adoption fees and sign the papers, the lady there said "Oh, you are taking her in? Really?" She told them that Randy had already been back twice, once because she bit the cat that had already lived in the house, that she was aggressive and mean. Obviously that made them a little nervous because the lady at the cat quarters hadn't told them that, but they wanted to go through with it after all.
Mom still gets mad thinking about the people who took Randy back and told such things about her.
Not that she was to stay a Randy any longer. They both hated the name, and Dad came up with Madam Mim instead. When Mom asked him why, he said "well, she's not pretty, but nice" (he revoked that statement about her not being pretty later).
Mim wasn't excited about the new place, but still as calm as they had been told she would be. She walked through all the rooms while Dude hid under the wardrobe. In fact he stayed there all night through. Mom who can be a terrible pessimist was close to tears, but Dad said to be patient, and if it really didn't work out, they would have to take Mim back.
That woke Mom's fighting spirit. There was no way that poor girl would be taken back again. And she didn't.
Dude and Mim never became close as in cuddling on the couch, but they got along just fine once Dude found it was time to come out from under the wardrobe the next day. They respected each other and never fought.
It quickly became obvious that Mim must have had some very bad experiences. When she had to vomit, she would hide under the bed afterwards and shiver. She was afraid of the brush and comb at first, but learned to love them although she never managed to sit still during a grooming session.
She wasn't a cuddly cat, but she always had to be close to her people, on a chair, at one end of the bed or at least in the same room.
When the young ones (that's for another story) got on her nerves, she only gave them one quick slap, and she was the only one who was not scared by Fips, the prairie dog, when he had one of his hissy fits.
Not even when she caught Frankenmaus, one of the gerbils who had managed to get out of the cage, she got mad when Mom dragged her out from under the bed.
She never bit anyone, not even during the epic fights when she had to go into the crate for vet visits.
And once, only once, she jumped on Mom's lap and stayed there for fifteen minutes. Mom says that this is a memory she treasures.
