Fancy Feline: I Grew to Like My Wife's Cat

If you have ever owned a cat as a pet I am hoping you can relate to ours.  When I met my wife I did not like cats at all.  In fact, I always said I would never own a cat.  He was a six year old, 21 pound cat when we first met.  He wasn’t too fond of me though.  He would run away every time I came over to my wife’s place.  However, that was surely to change.  My wife likes to sleep in on occasion, but Ozzie doesn’t.  He wants his breakfast first thing in the morning, usually around 6:00am.  I slept over one night and got up early to use the bathroom, around 5:30am or so.  I opened the bathroom door; to my surprise was a massive shadow.  I looked further and saw Ozzie standing without budging or running away.  “Meow,” he said. I smirked and tried to make it back to bed, but he did this weird thing of rubbing on my leg making me trip over him.  As I stumbled around I finally just went to the kitchen.  I remembered where my wife kept the cat food and thought to myself, “If I feed him, maybe he will go away.” 

I opened the can of wet cat food and out he sang, “Meow, meow.  Meow, meow.”  As I put the wet food into his dish, the floor started to shake.  I didn’t know what to think or what was happening.  My legs began to shake and a couple more meows came out.  I bent over and laid the dish down; the shaking didn’t stop.  I reached over to pet Ozzie when I realized what it was, it was him.  Ozzie has the loudest purr I have ever heard.  We relate his purr to being a “motorboat.”

Needless to say, Ozzie and I began a relationship I might not have wanted especially with the odd things that he does.  Ozzie and I played with his toys in the years to follow, allowing my wife to be happy knowing him and I can get along.  After my wife and I got married, we moved in together with Ozzie being our pet.  I blame my wife for his abnormal actions.  We would wake up every morning with my wife telling me a different story of how Ozzie would wake her up.  Of course, I didn’t believe her.  The stories she told me were outrageous and hard to believe.  Unfortunately, she had to travel to Florida for her schooling for about a week.  This left Ozzie and I to fend for ourselves.  It wasn’t too bad.  He followed me around some; keeping me from being lonely.

I woke up the first morning to a tickle at my nose.  I opened my eyes as a large feline was staring right back at me.  I closed my eyes thinking I could go back to sleep.  I was wrong.  In feeling a hairy paw hit my face, I got up.  I just thought to myself he just wants fed and he probably won’t stop until then.  I got up; he quickly followed to the kitchen, rubbing against my legs and motoring up a storm.  I told my wife the story of how Ozzie woke me up by pawing at my face, to my surprise, this is how he likes to wake her up for breakfast.  The next morning was a little different though; I felt a hairy forehead strike mine.  I was astonished by Ozzie head-butting me to wake me up.  I wasn’t falling for it this time, but he won.  After I fell back asleep, I felt paws crawling onto my stomach, chest and then my shoulders.  He laid flat on my face making me suffocate with fur in my nose and mouth.  My wife told me that the forehead bump is something new; thinking it was a new bond between him and me.  I disagreed.  He just wanted to get me up to feed him by any means necessary.

This all went on all week long with the pawing, crawling, suffocating me, and head-butting me.  I was happy to have my wife come home since he never did this to me when she was home.  To my dismay, even though she was home, he never bothered her again even to this day.  I guess that week without her showed him I wake up early and easily.  Every morning I am awakened by a gigantic mass of a cat weighing approximately 26lbs (don’t worry, he dieted and he is back to 22lbs now).  Even with a puppy around, Ozzie still insists on waking me up, not letting me ever sleep in.

Now I am going to back track a bit, because there is one thing I kept out.  After my wife and I moved in together, every night a wild animal comes into our home and screams.  It sounds like a hyena snuck into our home to raise hell.  About five to ten minutes after we lay down for the night, we hear howling through the darkness.  It is the loudest, most gruesome, noise I have ever heard in my life.  It actually sounds like Ozzie is in distress.  Fortunately, he is not.  I got up one night to check on him, to my surprise, there is Ozzie with a blanket between his legs and the end of the blanket in his mouth.  His paws moved back and forth, seemingly kneading the blanket.   I walked up to him as he laid there motoring and purring.  He let out a big “Meow;” I scooped him up and took him to the bed.  He nestled down between my wife and I and kept his motor boat going.

To this day, Ozzie howls in the middle of the night, stirring up our puppy, then the two of them rabbi up the night with playful antics.  Every time you walk out to him though, without the puppy being stirred up, he has a blanket in his mouth with most of it between his legs.  The other funny part, sometimes he does this up to three times with three different blankets.  We wake up with blankets all over the place, mostly close to our bedroom. 

After having Ozzie as a pet for the past couple of years, I can actually say I like this cat very much.  I probably wouldn’t be who I am without him or without his motoring, purring, and talking back to me.  He is definitely a unique animal.  He listens for his name being called and runs to get a treat.  Currently he weighs 21.9lbs and is 10 years old.  Hopefully he lives for another 10 years.