Happy Birthday, Beaucat

It's Beaucat's birthday, more or less. He's officially 17 years old.

Jane and I don't know the exact date that he and his sister Harrie were born. They didn't give us birth certificates when we got them in July 1993 at the St. Lucie County Animal Shelter in Fort Pierce, Florida. But we figured they were born sometime in March of that year. So Saint Patrick's Day is as good a day as any to designate as their birthday.

I've already talked about Beaucat's current condition in a recent post, so I won't go into a lot of detail again other than to say that he's an old guy who's hanging in there. He sleeps a lot, but he still reports for lap-cat duty on Thursday and Sunday evenings when we go to the front porch for sundowners.

So instead of focusing on his age, I thought I'd do a retrospective of his career. Here are some photos of him and his late sister, who died of cancer in 2005.

The first photo above was made around Christmas 1995, in Florida. The gray furry thing floating around his nose is a catnip mouse that was his Christmas present that year.

Here's Harrie with something she swiped from the Christmas tree in 1995. We borrowed the thing from "It's a Wonderful Life" about an angel being created every time a bell rings. We'd hang a bag of catnip next to a bell on the lowest branch of the tree so that any cat who swatted the bag would ring the bell. Harrie loved to swat the catnip.

This is Harrie soon after we moved to North Carolina in 1997. The table she's looking over was made by my grandfather sometime in the early 1920s.

Here's a photo I made in the winter of 1999. I couldn't believe that the cats sat this way long enough for me to grab the camera and get this shot. But it was a very cold day, and the wood stove was putting out a lot of heat, so I guess they had no reason to move.

Here's Harrie examining the final draft of Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. I shot this in May 2002.

Finally, here's a shot of Beaucat made on the night of September 18, 2003 a few hours after Hurricane Isabel blew right over us. The lighting is from a flashlight. We didn't get power back for a couple of weeks. Isabel was a very bad storm, but Beaucat and Harrie, being South Florida natives, ignored it. They curled up and snoozed on the couch while Jane and I worried about whether the house was going to withstand winds that included a 120-mph gust when the eye reached us.