Motley Sue is 20 today
That’s right, Motley Sue (and I swear, my mother named her) is embarking on her greatest adventure of them all: her twenties. In “dog years” math, that makes her 140. My vet back in North Hollywood says it actually makes her closer to 96 in human years. Either way, it makes her old.
Motley came into the family the August before my junior year of high school, when we were fresh off the airplane after moving back from Brussels. Since then, she’s moved with some iteration of the Yarbrough family almost a dozen times, including moving to Egypt with me. (She’s been with me more or less non-stop for the past 13 years.) She’s gone walkabout, as all cats seem to feel the need to at some point, living off the land for a month in Jefferson National Forest. She has led, even by human standards, a pretty full life, without even factoring in the whole sleeping-12-or-more-hours-a-day thing.
Apparently, the average lifespan for an outdoor cat is eight years old. The apparent average lifespan for an indoor cat is 12 years old. Motley has not just had nine lives, she’s seemingly on life 18.
At her advanced age, she spends most of the day sleeping (which, of course, differentiates her from all other adult cats not at all). She’s got very short range vision due to cataracts, and has bad hearing in one or both ears, meaning she’s not always aware of where we’re calling from when we call her. (“Are they on the ceiling? Worth looking up there to see.”) And, well, she has bathroom accidents. She also has progressive kidney disease, the big killer of cats who survive everything else. But, frankly, I should be so lucky to have twice as many things wrong with me when I’m 96.
If Motley makes it to 21, I’m taking her on a bar crawl.
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>
