..rocky bubu...and a thing about cats..

..my belle..ayam..

...I was never into cats as a kid or when I was a struggling youth trying to carve out an existence in Kuala Lumpur in the early sixties...cats were just..cats.....I did not care much about them and generally, they kept their distance from me....I was more into girls...they were the object of my dreams and fantasies..But I did not made any headway with them, either...girls of my age were just not interested in boys my age...and girls younger than me were not interested in anything...and I was only good for running errands with the older girls...

..and the late itek..

..it was only upon marriage and two kids later that cats entered my life...but they did not figure much...we were in Terengganu, and there were the beaches, stretches of beautiful beaches...and tantalising islands within the horizon...they cats were there, somewhere in the background, getting a rub or a pat as I rushed about busy as a servant of the government, a father and a husband...

..taking care of sick rocky bubu..

..but later, much later, three marriages, two divorces and 13 children later, the cats came in...a daugher in Form Three and her two years younger brother from my second marriage, about the only marriage that I have now, started it...they wanted some cats in the house...at least two...

..rocky bubu when first found...

...a house without cats is lonely, they said..and you both are not going to have babies anymore...
...hey, your father is not yet over the hill...its your mother...
...yes, they said...they still want a cat or cats...

.it was 2007..I was a retiree for 6 years..the eyes have stopped roving but the mind has not...might as well focus on some felines of the furry kind...its safer...and less tiring..or so I thought...

..before he turned sick..

..and so it was that we had ayam and itek...two furry balls that rolled straight into my heart...and when itek drowned a year later, there was not a dry eye in the house...

..giving bubu a wash from his  own excrement..

...cats are here to stay...and I believed that I became a better person because of them....and when my health improved, my wife and children said that it was because of the cats...and I agreed...

..