Idjit or Genius, Who Knows?

Why "The" Marmakitty?

People always ask me why I refer to him as "The" Marmakitty. Because that's his name, of course. Seriously, there is a reason.

When we lived in Seattle we had a floorshow on our back deck every night. We lived in a forest, and wild raccoons would come to the deck to eat cheap cat food and be entertaining. We had the sliding glass door closed between us, of course, these were wild animals, after all. No, we were not teaching them to be dependent on humans, they already were, and we only put out a little bit of food each night. At the same time, I also had all the area cats visiting us, mostly feral and uncatchable, but I still named them, as well as the raccoons. Thus, having named in excess of forty creatures, I was running out of names and had begun to use descriptives instead. The latest gray cat had become "The Gray, No Stripes". Then there was "The Tiger, Faint Stripes", and on it went.

One day an extremely large orange cat showed up, quite obviously male and proud of it. My husband and I began to talk about him when he chased off a full-grown male raccoon (50 pounds, at least). Then came the day this marmalade cat scared a female raccoon so badly she fled leaving her babies behind. That just does not happen. I, naturally, went out and chased off the cat, so the mother raccoon would retrieve her babies.

Eventually, that marmalade tomcat chased every other living creature away from our back deck, but he wasn't looking so great. We captured him and took him to our vet. The vet said the cat had adopted us, but he was on his last legs. If we weren't going to fix him up, he should be put to sleep. The vet wasn't sure which would kill him first, the lung infection, the ear mites and ensuing infection, or the fleas. (Who knew you could die from enough fleas?) We weren't even looking at his filthy teeth with possible abcesses, or the wounds in various stages of healing.

My husband said if we were adopting him (duh!) we should name him, and what kind of cat was he, anyway? I said he was that marmalade cat we'd been seeing for months. I didn't realize all this time I'd been naming the cat to the cat! Once we realized that, there was no changing it. Bob still insists this is a sissy name for a tough-guy tomcat, but we're all stuck with it, and besides, what does the cat know? It's not like the other boys will laugh at him. Thus, he became "The Marmakitty".