Blog Post: How Henry Got Her Name (Part I)

I love our cat. Her name is Henry.

You may be wondering how a she-cat came to be called such. I'll concede that ignorance played an important role in the decision. But let's start at the beginning.

The kitty next door

Henry the Cat

For many years the house just above our's on Bernal Hill in San Francisco belonged to an elderly couple who, well, did not keep the place up, to put it mildly. The situation got worse after the husband died. The back of the house decayed. The wood rotted. The back door literally fell off its hinges and hung from the rear of the structure. A great jungle of nasty and very tough weeds rose up from the rear yard and often threatened to spread into ours.

The widow also hoarded quite a lot of junk, it seems. Her good hearted nephew came by and sold some of it, or gave it away. She made do as best she could, accompanied by a small gray/white cat.

The cat obviously loved her aged protector. It greeted her on the street when she returned from grocery shopping. Since our neighbor's back door was dislodged, it just came and went as it so desired.

Sometimes the feline pooped in our garden, which annoyed us, so we shooed it off. When that happened, it would leap over our fence, and claw its way up to that broken back door hinge, staring suspiciously at us, safe from 20 feet above the ground.

I had a few unexpected interactions with the little critter. One evening it stood in our rain alley, meowing rather loudly. I walked out into the back yard and puzzled as it stood there trembling.

"What's wrong?" I asked the cat.

It kept mewing. It also kept looking over my shoulder. I glanced in the direction upon which the cat's glare had fixed. There, on the fence, were three big, fat raccoons, about five feet away, staring at me and the cat.

I jumped back into the house. The raccoons teetered on the fence for about five minutes, clawed about aimlessly, then marched off towards Bernal Heights Park on the top of the hill. Once the coast was clear, the cat leaped back up to its perch. I watched it. It watched me. We both went to bed.

The lean months

Eventually the widow's kin showed up, got mom, and trundled her off to an assisted living home. But nobody thought to relocate the cat. In fairness, it was a bit wild, this little beast, and not inclined to be picked up by anyone but her now moved mistress. For a while the house stood empty save the semi-feral pet, occasionally fed by the nephew or his mother via a bowl of cat food placed next to the garage door.

Then a local residential developer bought the property. He hired a contractor to flush the hovel out and rebuild it. This was no easy task. It meant stripping the joint of an amazing quantity of garbage, then rebuilding it from scratch. For weeks and weeks my partner Sharon and I marvelled as workers carried out a seemingly endless pile of wood, pipe, plaster, and dirt from the place, only to discover more the next day.

All this activity, needless to say, drove the cat from the residence. It lurked in our alleys, on our back yard fence, and atop those of others. It slinked around under our neighbors' back yard tool garage. And the poor thing looked pretty miserable; staring at us from a distance through the evening before slipping off into the night. To make matters worse it was the rainy season.

Then we started noticing the dead rats.

These large eviscerated rodents were left on our back yard doorstep. One's demise was particularly impressive. The cat had eaten it exactly in half. The head, front paws, and chest remained; the rump end of the vermin snarfed down with gusto. No entrails were left behind. Three of these victims appeared in about the same place over four weeks. Clearly, somebody was trying to develop a relationship with us.

After throwing the latest rat in the garbage, I glanced around. There was our homeless cat, looking rather pathetically at me. And getting pretty skinny too.

"Maybe we should start feeding it," Sharon said to me one morning. So I went down to the grocer, bought a small box of Purina dry food, and put it out in a bowl where the rats had been left. Within four hours, the container was empty.

To be continued . . . .