In an earlier post about the cats in my life, I wrote that I had a stray who died suddenly. That was Percy, short for Percival, an all white cat who was named by a friend of mine in Minneapolis. He showed up one day, in pretty good shape for a stray, and I took him to the vet who pronounced him in good health. No feline leukemia, which was important. He asked if I wanted to vaccinate him, but that didn’t make much sense, since I didn’t know his past history and he wasn’t a kitten, by any means.

Percy refused, absolutely refused, to come inside the house. I have no idea what trauma he associated with houses, but he was definitely an outdoor cat. He was also a little bit psycho – I’d be petting him and all of a sudden, he’d bite and usually draw blood. After awhile, I learned the signs that indicated that he might suddenly bite and parted company before he could indulge. He was a good cat, very friendly, and he loved to be scratched on the head.

Percy was a part of my life for about three years. During that time, he sometimes developed a cold and would sneeze and appear to have the sniffles, but I didn’t think much of it. Cats are pretty durable critters, after all. And Percy always bounced back in a week or so.

About two years before Hurricane Andrew, about the same time that Percy had come into my life, I went to a sidewalk art show on Key Biscayne (the next barrier island south of Miami Beach) and bought a couple of ceramic pieces. My love for cats was just starting at about that time. One of the pieces was a small platter depicting a cat on its’ back showing off its’ foot pads. I still have that platter. The other was a bathroom soap dispenser with a cat design, in glaze, on it.

One night, while making a light-less visit to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I accidentally knocked the soap dispenser to the tiled floor and it broke, spilling liquid soap all over the floor. Not wanting to clean it up at that time of the morning, I went back to bed. When I woke up in the morning, I cleaned up the soapy mess on the bathroom floor and then went outside to feed Percy, as was my habit. I was stunned to see his lifeless body, still in rigor mortis, lying on the ground. He had not been dead very long, because he was still stiff. He had been sneezing again, but I didn’t think much of it. After all, he had always snapped back before. Besides, who ever heard of a cat dying from a cold? But there he was, dead, lying on the ground.

To this day, I wonder about the relationship between the broken bathroom soap dispenser and Percy. Did Percy die when I accidentally broke the soap dispenser? It had been on the bathroom counter for almost two years and I had never brushed it before when reaching to flush the toilet. Was the fact that I broke the soap dispenser a sign that I should have gone outside and checked on Percy? I had never done that before – who does? Besides, I was too sleepy-eyed to make the connection between an inanimate object and Percy. I was angry at myself for breaking the dispenser – Percy never entered my thoughts at that time.

I still don’t have a hand-made soap dispenser in the house.

‘Tis a mystery that will never be solved. Cue the music from The Twilight Zone ….