Uplifting tails of the kitty category

Love and smarts come hard and slow to some. My kitties, for example. We got Ivy for my daughter C on her ninth birthday. Ivy was a dumb blonde—white with black beauty spots, including a lovely heart at the base of her tail, and not much gray matter between the ears. She was terrified of her own tail. Sometimes she would catch sight of it and dash for the underside of the couch. Proof of her idiocy: she loved me and loathed every other human. Not a single other animal has made that mistake. Any being with hair, scales or shell knows that Other is the one to love in our house. He feeds everyone, including me. So Ivy spent most of her life hiding from the wrong person. She had this way of making anyone who approached her feel like a kitterast. What with that and the way she mostly hid under the furniture, people pretty much left her alone. She spent her days licking herself and sleeping. Her immediate family—i.e., Other, C and I—acknowledged that she was a dud, but a sweet dud.

When Ivy was about 5, I had another birthday problem. There was nothing C wanted that I could bear to give her. Now I know it's totally wrong to get an animal for a kid just because you can't think of another present—but that's what I did. And it was like night and day: Ivy was white, and Iggy was black. Ivy was dainty and demure. Iggy was a rascally scofflaw. He was a crowd pleaser. She was social poison. He wanted to play. She wished he were dead. 

And that's how cat life went for several years in our apartment: Ivy hid, while Iggy climbed the walls, caught cockroaches and strutted about showing off the twiggy legs writhing between his teeth, snatched birds from the deck and dismembered them behind the couch, chased sunbeams scattered by the prism hanging in the window, opened closed doors with his bare paws, shredded the clothes in my closet, barfed into the radiator grate, used the entire house as toilet paper, ate his food and Ivy's, and grew to twice her size. It was like having one supercat and one ghost cat.

But over the past year, as Iggy has continued his reign of terror, Ivy has begun to change. At the age of 9, which must be late middle age in cat years, she has emerged from beneath the couch and begun to ... play. It's weird. I've caught her striking out with a paw at Iggy then scampering out of his reach—in a kind of joyful teasing way. I've seen her chasing her own tail—and not looking scared. She's begun to warm up to Other. There's something touching about these tentative forays, as though she's practicing to be a real cat and might get embarrassed if you caught her. It's also inspiring. It's as if nine years after her actual birth, she is finally coming alive.

Now if a cat can make serious changes in her behavior, achieve a major attitude adjustment, wake up and enjoy life, humans can too. There's proof in every domain. If an electorate that TWICE voted George Bush into office can do an about-face and elect Barack Obama, anything is possible.