An Old Lady and Her Cat — and Rita Hayworth!

      FRIENDS, in our time of troubles and quarantines, I can’t go out and make mischief for the powers that be, so I just stay home with my friend George, who happens to be a feline friend.

See us here in our living-room in Paddock Hills.

 

Now George is an indoor-outdoor person, just as I am.  During the day, I work in my yard, and George keeps guard over the house from his back porch, a screened-in affair he’s very fond of.  He has his own chair out there!  Can you find him in the photo below? 

And here’s George sleeping peacefully in his nice soft chair in the living room.

And taking a drink from a tub of water that’s my humidifier!

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•                                                     Rita  Hayworth

•                 AT NIGHT George and I sit together on my living room sofa and watch YouTube.  One of our favorites is Fred Astaire dancing with a young woman you may have heard of — Rita Hayworth!  My god she’s good, this tall, skinny woman with all the right moves!  We see her with Fred in an old black and white movie called You Can’t Get Rich (1942).  You gotta catch these two!  Just google Astaire and Hayworth on YouTube.  Then click on a four-minute spot called “Sway With Me!” Or “Shorty George”!  But hey, I’ve got a link for you down below — so you can catch these guys with one click!

      RITA HAYWORTH had danced with her father in shows around the country and soon found herself in the movies.  Though she loved to dance, she never wanted to become a film idol — or “the most beautiful woman in show biz,” as she became known.  She craved to stay home with a sweet, ever-loving husband, but such an animal is hard to find, after all!  Miss Hayworth had a series of husbands, including Orson Welles, but none of them wanted to stay home with her, even though she was the most beautiful etc. etc. Hayworth gave birth to two daughters, and then not too many years later, she died — of Ahlziemier’s, and one of her daughters led a U. S. campaign to support other sufferers from this dread disease!

       BUT BACK TO GEORGY PORGY (Puddin’ Pie).  Who Is this George who watches YouTube with me — and keeps guard over my back porch? 

Well, George has his story.  (We all have our stories, after all.)  He was adopted by my daughter Paige from a friend’s litter, but she quickly realized she was allergic to him, and in his infantile years, he hardly ever got to come inside.  When she and my granddaughter Ellen moved back to Cincinnati from Las Cruces, New Mexico, guess who took this kitty in?

George has stayed the course with me.  He’s been my best friend for some years now.  His doctor says he has a heart murmur now, but not to worry.    He may be okay for quite some time, it seems.  I once wrote, btw, on this blog about George and our beautiful friend Lucy Dog.  Lucy, too, had needed, during her late years, a refuge, and she found it with George and me!  We loved her to death.  (Please see on this blog A Tree, a Dog, and Death So Near.)

 

                                                             A Cat Refuge

       NOW LOOK, I GOTTA SAY that in my later years, my house has been nothing but a Cat Refuge.  Animals are dropped off on me by my children.  My daughter Shelley gifted me once with a puny little dark-striped cat named Mayo that I became quite fond of.  She had found baby Mayo cold and trembling under a car one night on a certain street, and took him home with her!   She soon moved into a condo, though, and Mayo did not fit in.  So yeah — I took him in on Bristol Lane.  Years later, the poor thing died in my back yard of what the vet had told me was feline HIV!

      My son gifted me once with a yellow tabby that didn’t like me much and immediately ran away.  A year later, I saw him sunning himself comfortably in a yard on a street in the neighborhood.  A neighbor woman had thought he was a stray and taken him in!  (The nerve of her — and him!)

        ANOTHER  CAT I will always remember was Wildcat!  Before we got a screen in our kitchen window, my husband and I would find in the mornings that some animal had gotten in and taken bites out of the leavings on the counter.  What kind of animal likes a piece of leftover toast? we asked ourselves..

Wildcat then turned up now and then on the back porch, very hungry, but he was terribly afraid of us humanoids.  I began to put before him a dish of food, and gradually he let me come close to him.  Finally I reached out one day and stroked his head very gently.  From then on he was mine!  Wildcat came to love me very much.  But after a few years he got sick.  I took him to the vet, and the vet said No hope!  Kidney failure, he said.  Possibly something he ate, I was told, and frankly, I think he was poisoned by someone who didn’t want him around their property.  (I cannot forgive that!)

       SO MY FRIENDS, be cool, be safe, be good to yourself and your animals (if you have any), and stay in touch!  Leave me a Comment, perhaps?  Or a photo of an animal person you’re acquainted with?  You need not identify yourself — just be Anonymous, if that suits you! 

 

  See Comments below this link.

Here’s that beautiful link for Fred and Rita!  Choose Sway with me on far left.