User Submitted Blog Post: How Henry Got Her Name - Part II

Continued from here

And so we began feeding the next door neighbor's now abandoned cat. This immediately presented several problems. The first was that it lurked about the back yard more often, stalking the finches and mourning doves that ate bird seed off of our various feeders. We headed off this threat by putting out cat food towards the evening, which successfully resulted in the feline gravitating to our yard around 5 pm when most of the birds had gone away.

The second problem was that, being typical anthropomorphizing human beings, we wanted to talk to the cat when it arrived. That meant that we had to give it a name.

I came up with Henry because, at least to me, the cat looked like a Henry. It had a sort of gray siamese-ness to it that was (again, to my thinking) just very Henry-like. I experience "Henry" as a sort of quiet and fuzzy personae. I think that Sharon went along with the name because she was a big fan of the west coast modernist composer Henry Cowell. In any event, by various means we got to the name Henry, and it stuck, at least for us. We were aware, of course, of the possibility that Henry was a she, but decided that this didn't mean very much in the cosmic scheme of things; we living in San Francisco and all.

Getting to know you

In any event, Henry liked our grub but was quite suspicious of her benefactors. She usually skulked in around five o'clock and chowed down the dry food we'd left out. We called the cat by its new name, and Henry usually ran away at the sound of our voices. But, as always, after she'd gotten a safe twenty feet back, she would usually just stand her ground and look at us.

One evening, after Henry had finished her dinner. She started meowing again. Sharon went out into the back yard to say hello, and Henry walked up to her and allowed herself to be petted. It wasn't easy petting Henry, at first. She paced back and forth while the stroking took place, and meowed rather frantically through the whole experience. The next night I got to pet Henry. Then she pulled away and just stared at us from a distance again.

Several weeks later, however, Sharon called me into the kitchen. There was Henry, who had come in through the back door while we had left it open for a few minutes. Henry stood in the center of the kitchen and looked at us. She walked quickly up and down the floor as she had outside, meowing away and letting us each pet her for a few minutes, then pacing again. Then she ran out the door and into the night.

Moving in

Then one Wednesday evening when I was out of town, Sharon called me to let me know that Henry had stayed the previous night. Apparently it was an exhausting experience. The cat wandered about the house moaning and pacing, and then jumped into our bed, demanding to be continuously petted. Then in the morning Henry ran out of the house again.

This event repeated itself for the next three nights. "I don't know how much longer I can take it," Sharon told me.

By the time I got back Henry had more or less calmed down. After a week or so our interactive pattern had stabilized. Henry usually arrived at the back door for dinner at around 5 pm. Then she watched TV with us while we ate. Then she stayed the night and usually slept in our bed. Then in the early morning after breakfast, she ran out the door for her day of stalking birds, hanging around alleys, and groaning menacingly at other cats.

Slowly but surely, Henry moved in. She found a comfortable place in our bed upon which sunlight from the window always shines, and she sleeps there through much of the day. She does most of her hunting around the house now, episodically attacking and shredding editions of The Economist, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker (we try to remember to keep the real estate pages out so that she'll assault them instead). She is always on the lookout for a comfortable lap to sit on during the evening.

On the other hand, Henry does occasionally revert back to the old ways.

To be continued . . .