Charlie, Tiger, & Tuffy

I’ve written about them before, shown pictures, and now I’d like to describe them as humans, our three children—Tiger, Tuffy, and Charlie—our three boys so distinctively individual. Charlie is a big cat, a tuxedo with long legs, and is the most handsome cat I’ve ever seen (not pretty, not beautiful, for those terms wouldn’t suggest his masculinity even though he’s been tutored (neutered) when he was a wee lad. He has a silky black coat, back and tail, and a snowy belly and face. He’s now just over three years old, and he still barely accepts me or any strangers in the house. He lets me pet him when he naps in our bed in the afternoon, but if I try to pet him any other time he skitters off to the side. He’ll often get on Rosalie’s lap but never on mine. He and the other two are great friends who take turns bathing each other and racing around from the back patio to the living room, navigating at high speed through the table and chair legs in our dining area. I have no idea how they can do that without knocking themselves silly on an intervening leg.

Tiger and Tuffy are orange tabby siblings we got when there were tiny babies. That's Tiger on the left and Tuffy on the right. At first, as with most twins, we couldn’t tell them apart. After a while, their personalities emerged—Tiger, darker colored stripes and more aggressively alpha, Tuffy, somewhat lighter stripes and a beta attitude. Tiger stares at us with eyes aslant and Tuffy with eyes wide open and innocent. Tiger plays endlessly with plastic balls, batting them up and down from kitchen to laundry room, little soccer feet as skillful as Beckham’s. Tuffy prefers the quieter artificial mice that he flips in the air. Both deliberately shove their toys of choice under whatever they can shove them under, loving the challenge of retrieval. Both of them climb onto anything above floor level, the higher the better, the higher the naughtier. Tiger defies us by finding any blind or curtain string to chew on, any real or artificial plant to chew on. We now keep all plants, real or artificial, in the closed spare bedroom along with all the breakable knick-knacks we own. We now have an essentially knick-knackless house. Charlie only sits and watches his brother’s bad behavior, giving a “tsk tsk” and a head shake when they misbehave. We’re convinced they never do bad when we’re gone, only when we’re here to see them perform. Every afternoon, we give them a treat (even though they don’t necessarily deserve a treat), dividing a small can of wet food. Charlie and Tiger will always wait in the kitchen until we put their plates down. We have to go find Tuffy and present his plate wherever we find him. Tiger eats most of what he gets and Charlie apparently doesn’t know how to eat wet food, licking it but not picking any up except what sticks to his tongue. And Tuffy eats everything and licks his plate clean. Unlike our previous pair, Dusty and Squeakie, these three never sleep with us except when they hear one or the other of us get up for an early morning pee run. Then Tuffy will come in to sleep for a while cradled in my right arm. Then Tiger will enter to chew momentarily on Rosalie’s hair before settling down between our pillows. Charlie, poor antisocial Charlie, will sit in the hall outside our door, sort of peeking in at us until he’ll finally give in and join us for a brief while before we all get up to begin another day. I read of horrific acts perpetrated on cats and dogs and I don’t understand how anyone could do such things to these little creatures. How can anyone treat these little people as less than little people? But then, some people do horrific things to big people. How sad.