Catt's Corner
Spitfire: The Ultimate Cat
NOTE: Spitfire was a real, bona fide, member of our family. I wrote this column in 1987 as a memorial for our favorite feline.
The best loved cat of all time in our house was an orange tiger tom named Spitfire. Earning his name at birth, Spitfire came into the world blind, wet, helpless, no bigger than a ball of lint removed from the dryer screen, but spitting and hissing all the same.
Feisty little thing. We came to believe that this was the Ultimate Cat.
He was known by other names. My husband called him Dipstick because he didn't have enough sense to get out from under a dripping faucet, or away from the children when they had that "let's play with the cat!" gleam in their eyes.
Anyone who ever watched him drape himself over the back of a chair would have agree that he was Boneless. No animal with bones can be that pliable.
Because of his obvious mastery of the highest feline art form, my daughter called him Sleep-Eze. (We meant to tell him that, of course, as soon as we caught him awake.)
I just called him Worthless because he did nothing to earn a living. The LEAST he could have done was hired an agent. Auditioned for a cat calendar. Moonlighted as a yoga instructor.
As he grew from precocious kitten to accomplished cat, we began to realize that by some stroke of the miraculous, our mommy-cat and her tiger-tom boyfriend had somehow managed to join together under just the right configuration of stars to create - THE ULTIMATE CAT!
He was perfectly cat-like in every aspect. He was more magnificient than Morris, more charming than the Cheshire cat, more sibilant than Sylvester. We even dared believe that he was greater than Garfield.
His fur was thick, soft and luxurious without being long and flyaway or short and unmanageable. If cats were consumers of cosmetics, he could have been cast in commercials for Clairol conditioners (and shampoos!).
And get this - he never shed.
And he was smart. He could open doors by himself
(inside, outside, cupboard, and sliding.) Not only could
he hear ANY kind of can opener from three blocks away, he
knew what kind of cat food it was. We knew he was a step
higher on the evolutionary scale than any cat who came
before when he learned to ride our big dog, a Rhodesian
ridgeback. (True story!)
He was finely formed in every facet and feature: he was Fate's favorite feline. And as if this weren't enough - he had been impossibly endowed with a fourteen-inch tail.
A truly triumphant tail, tastefully tabbied and tapering to a talkative tip. Spitfire's tail was long enough to drape over both shoulders and, being boneless, he made this feat seem not only effortless, but fashionable as well.
He was easy to get along with, ate nearly anything you gave him, was too lazy to scratch the furniture, and did his business neatly out- of-doors. He tolerated children, dogs, strangers, and other cats. There was no one who came in our front door who did not, at the very least, LIKE Spitfire.
In awe, we realized that we were in the presence of greatness; we were the blessed recipients of the result of 30 million years of evolution - the ULTIMATE CAT.
God, we believed, never made a better cat. Spitfire was what God had in mind when he drew up the original cat design. Mommy-cats everywhere wanted to give birth to kittens like Spitfire; kittens everywhere wanted to grow up to BE Spitfire. Children who asked for a kitten wanted Spitfire. He was so great even dogs wanted to be like him.
40 million years of evolution couldn't be wrong.
We began to have fantasies of breeding our Ultimate Cat into a line called Long-Tailed Marmalades. We would win fame and fortune by producing cats that no one could hate, thereby engraving our names and Spitfire's in the annals of natural selection and Cat History. We could perpetuate and preserve a bloodline that took nature 50 million years to perfect. Ah, the dream was grand.
But, alas, as all good dreams, this one too came to an end one morning when Spitfire was killed by a passing automobile. 35 million years of evolution undone in a single moment.
So, Spitfire, I am sorry for the dreams you didn't live, the laps you didn't grace, the kittens you didn't sire. We loved you and the only engraving in Cat History is in our hearts for you and your many names.
