A loving tribute: Barney - My Cat Chapter 1 - We Meet  April 1981 Chapters in Barney's Life with Us Intro Introduction Page New Denver: Stranger on Our Doorstep 1981 Denver: Fun Times Together 1983 Dearborn: Adventure in Moving 1987 Dearborn: The Baby Arrives 1992 Utah: Early Retirement / Figment Arrives 1995 The final Chapter Working On It

Barney Arrives We had been married barely two years, and living in our first house barely a month when around 9pm a loud meow came from the front door. I opened it to see an alien site on our small porch. A pure black cat, handsome and clean, yet starving and skittish. He was obviously socialized to people, lost, and starving. Our house had only been built a few months before, and the entire neighborhood had been a field less than a year previously.  I announced him to be a neighbor's pet or a stray and shut the door. But he continued to cry and we decided to wait '5 minutes'. As Lyn opened a can of tuna and brought it to the porch. I slowly opened the door and began to talk softly and provide him a meal. Just then, a large dog (great dane?), 50 feet away and across the street, saw him and us and truely darted in full sprint across the street and directly at him. The starving and lost cat heard the attacker in a split second and instantly spawled his claws and sprinted off like a rocket. We delayed the dog, but the moment, and the cat was lost. We walked about the neighborhood for nearly and hour with flashlights calling for him, but sadly went to bed. For all day there was no sign of him, but at the same 9pm hour came the same cry. This time we brought him in and fed and petted him. I announced that we should not bond with him or name him until we took him to the vet in the morning for a physical. We would not get attached to a stray with a cancerous tumor or needing asthma medicine. If he was ill, we would do him the favor of putting him down. We pulled the car out of the garage and put in a bowl of food and water and a makeshift litterbox from  the bottom of a moving crate with a shovelful of clay from the backyard. We turned out the light and we to bed.

A Visit to the Vet  In the morning, we brought him in the house and fed him again. We was tame, with clear eyes and good hygene. After an hour or so, we became panic stricken, crying and pacing from room to room. When we headed for a corner of the living room, it was obvious that his panic was due to his 'litter box' bein still in the garage. We had not yet learned to communicate. At the vet's, we explained he was a stray that we wanted to checked out, but the receptionist started a file anyway. "What is the cat's name? Boy or Girl?". "Look", I said, "we don't know, thats why we are here, put down "Cat-X" for now". I remember her odd look. The vet took only a few minutes to look him over and pronounced him starving and in good health. He was somebody's pet, male and fixed, and he speculated thrown out because the famiy was tired of him. Months later we found out that the vet's calling was large animals, that we was in our town to service horses and sheep, and that our new subdivision was definately bringing the city to his little town. We should have suspected from the faux hitching posts at the parking lot and the 'dry gulch' theme for the building. But I digress. He announced that the cat was around 5 years old, and I asked how he decided. The wear on his teeth from eating. "What if he ate a lot of rough things, like bark, might he be younger?" I asked. I remember his odd look and we were soon out the door with our new pet.

Barney Gets a Name I returned to work, and Lyn headed out shopping. When I returned, our new child was fully equipped with a plastic food and water bowl neatly set upon fresh newspaper in a corner of the kitchen at the end of the cabinets, and a sparkling new littler box neatly set upon fresh newspaper in the basement near the furnace. A small catnip mouse and a shaker box of the majic weed were sitting on the counter. We got up from his nap to greet me. I had wanted to call him "Paws", as a pun on the word "Pause", and started to call him Kitty-Paws, but Lyn would do no thing. On his second or third day at our house, Lyn announced his new name. She had been watching TV, and a hilarious commercial for McCulluch chain saws had been running. A couple of woodchucks were buying a saw for their grandpa woodchuck, because 'his teeth aren't as good as they used to be'. Each commercial hads lots of silly banter (much like Disney's Chip and Dale) as they shopped for the saw, but the last one ended with the smarter one cutting off the 'goofy' one, as the screen went black. "That's enough, Barney" Lyn announced that the cat would be Barney. The name stuck. And it was ever thus so. Not Barney Rubble. Certainly not Barney the Dinosaur. Barney the silly woodchuck buying his grandpa a McCulluch chain saw.

Our Little Secret My brother had just visited us the week before Barney's arrival, and my parenets were due to come on their vacation in about another month. I decided we should keep mum on Barney's existance until they arrived, again, in case of his running away or having some catastrophe. I didn't want to add lots of excitement and then confusion in that case. If he was still our pet when my parents arrived, we would 'go public' with him.

Road to Recovery Lyn decided to feed him the latest cat food fad of fresh 'pouch' packs. She didn't want to be opening and dealing with messy can food like the cats of her childhood. My childhood cats had been feed dry food with cans as a treat. the pouches seemed more desirable, with a fresh and soft sense to them. A couple years later, he was diagnosed with gravel in his bladder from too much ash in foods like the pouches, so he spent 90% of his life eating only Science Diet dry food for older cats. But for his first few weeks, it was Purina food pouches for him. He had been starving, so Lyn wisely bought pouches designed for "two-cat families". We gave him one double-size pouch each morning, then another double-size pouch at dinnertime. We didn't want a hign-maintenance scheduled cat, and knew we would eventually switch to 'dry food', but for now we watched him sing and dance everytime we made a production about fetching the pouches ("What flavor today? Tuna? Chicken?"). What a delight. After a week or so, I read the box lazily while Barney ate, only to see that the pouches were supposed to be given once a day, along with grazing on dry food. It wasn't that Barney was on "Double-Portions" during his recovery. He was actually being fed a volume to keep FOUR cats fed and happy. As the weeks elapsed, he ate and slept, and preened and relaxed. But after three full weeks, he still looked gaunt when my parents arrived for their visit.

Who is training who? A favorite story from his month on twice a day double pouches is how Barney began to set his internal alarm clock, singing and dancing as breakfast and dinnertime arrived each day. It was fun during dinner to have him get excited, and talk loudly as we fetched his food. However, morning was another story. His 9 am wake up songs, slowly became 8:30 and 8am. Within a week it was 7:30, 7, and 6:30. His 'breakfast' feeding was formally retimed to 'lunch' the morning that he hopped into our bed and started to beg his breakfast literally at dawns first light. While we pushed him away, we was persistant, eventually setting himself on my sleeping chest, placing his paws on my chin, and proceeded to lick my closed eyelids. Yes, it was summertime in Denver at it was just around 5:30 am. The new cat was hungry, and his morning feeding was immediately rescheduled to noon.

We asked around We were feeling very guilty that we might have kidnapped some family's pet. While feeding him back to health, we asked around our new neighborhood if anybody had lost a black cat or knew anybody that lost one or even had one. No, nobody had any clue. We also ran a small (free) ad in the local flyer paper, describing Barney and leaving our telephone number, but no calls arrived (thank God). When we talked to the family across the street, a older divorced mother sharing the house with her grown divorced daughter and 10 year old juvinile delinquent grandson, we got an odd response. The had two rather large dogs, noisy, dirty, slobbery, yucky, and she told us with quite a bit of drama about that 'damn stray' that had the audacity to upset her dogs by sneaking some food out of the bowls she left on her back porch. "We took him him in", we explained, "he was starving". "Yeah, so what?" was her kind and courteouss response. That was a rude awakening for us, just 10 weeks in our new house, in a newly built subdivision of starter homes. It was supposed to be a year of block parties and trick-or-treating, shared trips to the hardware store and you-help / I -help projects of laying sod and building fences. No, not in our little corner of Denver. Today, Denver is a large and sprawling, sophisticated urban city. It has art museums and major league sports franchises and traffic jams and a busy airport. But in the summer of 1981, it was a small backward hick town, clutching onto the wild west hill country folk mentality, the land of gun racks and "Native" bumper stickers. We didn't fit in and we never fit in. It was two years before we knew it well enough that we moved away. But our talk with our new neighbor about our poor abandoned kitty-cat was our first drink from that very very cold well.

Barney tells us some secrets While we were getting to know each other, we were in constant wonder about the mystery of Barney's life before his appearance in ours. We watched him for signs to see if he was a member of a family or a barnyard stray. His instinctive behavior, from time to time, told us snippets of his life before we met. Canned Food: During his first week with us, as we opened a can of soup his ears perked up and he ran to the kitchen meowing loudly. Obviously, the last family had feed him canned food. We continued to feed him pouches and eventually switched to dry food. Within a month, his response to the can opener disappeared. Newspapers: Once while he lazed on the carpet and I sat reading the paper, my shaking it caused him to lurch in panic, sprawl spread eagle, and look at me with sheer terror on his face. Obviously, the last family used a newspaper as a form of discipline. He was always a little anxious around that sound, but the look of terror soon dissipated. No Compass: On one or two occasions, as the weather got warmer, we thought to allow Barney a walk about the neighborhood. Each time he would set out in a straight path (a random direction) and have no sense of looking back or circling toward home. We would eventually have to physically pick him up two or three houses away and carry him home. His look was always so puzzled and he could not even lead himself in through the front door. We figured this to be how we was lost and starving when we found him. Small Children: To his very last day, we was always consistently afraid of small children. A visiting neighbor, years later our small nieces, then our own son always left him totally petrified, wide-eyed and hiding under the bed. He actually hissed and swung a claw in the air on one or two occasions. There was a magical age in his senses, where a child was suddenly 'old enough' to be trusted. It was when the child was around three years old in each case, that Barney would suddenly not shirk and hide but instead come out to be petted and played with, acting as if he had always been friends with his new young companion. We assumed his terror must be from some trauma in his prior family, and possibly the very reason he was meowing on our front porch that night.

Barney goes Public Within the month, my parents arrived on vacation and we introduced them to Barney. Some of his earliest pictures are from their visit, and we remember him 'fattened out' from when we first met. However, to look back at those pictures now, he was still skinny as a rail and eating double portions. Unknown to us at the time, it would be another  six months before he was finally at the general body shape, square and stocky but not overweight, that he would spend the rest of his days. He most impressed everybody with his friendliness, jumping on the couch to be next to you while you read the paper or watched television. He loved to play, chasing a small knot of twine we tied up to resemble a mouse. He would chase me from room to room (raising the question of who was getting more exercise) and I would love to pull the twine under the kitchen chairs, causing him to jump over or crawl under the low chair supports, always done at blinding speed. He was very fast and very agile, and everybody delighted in his play. He also was a bed cat, from the first days to his last, he would join us in bed, crawling right under the covers and never panic as we tossed and turned. He would also nap on our bed, and sleep with me during my period of living 'long-days', 30 hour periods that permitted me nighttime access to the business office where I did my programming. Finally, he was very clean, preening himself constantly and his black fur was always dark and shiney, and glowed with orange and brown strands when he sat in the direct sunlight. But his most intriguing feature was his extra toe. Barney was <?>, born with a sixth toe that oppossed the normal rounded set each cat has. Instead of a small rounded foot, shaped like an oar or paintbrush, as most cats have; Barneys foot quite simply resembled a black furry mitten. No we were never tempted to call him "mittens" although must such cats are so named. But, try as I might, he could not make use of his extra toe, and instead simply tolerated its presence as he stood about. I tried to have him hold things (most notably a pencil), but he could not. When chasing a ball or string toy, the extra toe provided no benefit for him. Although his unexpected 'thumb' was definately his trademark for all of his days.

Original Web Upload September 2001 Last Update: February 10, 2002