I remember crouching down on a concrete aisle between holding pens in the county animal shelter with my small girls as we tried to determine which of all the cats would become a part of our family. There were so many nice and pretty cats it was a hard decision and one of the ladies who worked there was assisting us.
After some time, our guide came over carrying a small Orange Tabby.
I can still see the young cat with wild looking eyes in my mind. He was different from all the other cats. He exhibited an untamed spirit that was evident as soon as she put him on the floor. When his feet hit the ground he streaked off, rushing to find his freedom. I had my doubts.
As I expressed my misgivings about his suitability, the woman from the animal shelter worked to get our agreement because if this particular cat wasn’t adopted soon, his life would come to an end. We understood his plight and because we had come to rescue a cat from such a doom we decided to take him home. As we took our new family member home I never imagined that he would finish elementary, junior high, high school and college with the two daughters who triumphantly carried him over our threshold.
My daughters decided to name our cat “Simba” because they loved the popular movie of the time and because he had the color of the animated beast as well. I named him Binx and there was soon a battle over what he would really be called. In the end he was dubbed Simba Binx Butterfield.
Binx continued to display his independence and as Kilee entered kindergarten she went to school with scratches on her face almost every day. She loved the cat and tried to display it, but the cat didn’t respond in kind. It wasn’t long before bedtime became a wild, gyrating event because the cat would attack the feet of the girls as they ran to their beds and hid them under the covers. Then, once in the middle of the night, as I slept, I felt some liquid running down my arm and opened my eyes just in time to see the dreaded cat complete his squat and dart into the darkness. There was running, yelling, crying and pleading throughout the house and in the end, the cat barely lived.
I was at my wit’s end so I called the animal shelter for help. They gave me the phone number of a local cat behavior expert and we talked about his manners. She helped me understand that he was angry with us because we wouldn’t let him go outside. (We had signed a contract with the animal shelter when we adopted him stating that we would keep him in the house so we did.) The expert said that he needed to be able to go outside because his life before us was full of the freedom that the outdoors offered and he loved it. She said, “Let him go out when he wants to.” We did! Our relationship improved greatly.
Over the next seventeen years we moved twice and added another daughter to our family. We also added two dogs, several horses and some cows as well. Through it all, our cat was part of our lives and we nursed him back to health after something bit the end of his tail off one night, one of his ears was shredded while fighting, he became blind in one eye and was run over by a car. As you can imagine all of this experience mellowed him and he became more and more of an indoor cat. In fact, during the last years of his life he slept at my wife’s side and purred the entire night.
Unfortunately, the purring stopped this week and was replaced by tears as Simba Binx Butterfield passed away. But the lessons he taught us have not passed with him.
We all learned that with love, patience and understanding, life can be transformed from a battle ground to happy years of caring, peace and love. And, perhaps most of all, we learned that providing love, patience and service will create deep relationships that live well beyond the strength of our bodies.
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