Or the Tale of Radcliffe Jellylorum

In the last post, dedicated to Chuck, Brent, and Shiela, which you can read here: When the River Won’t Flow: A Pounce of Cats, I told the tale of the cats that were members of the family while I was growing up. But the next generation also had wishes concerning a pet – and this is that tale.

Twenty-some years later, we had a little daughter who wanted a cat. I took her to a shelter, and we brought home a cat who had been returned to them three times. Some dear little kittens were hard to pass by. But our wise little girl chose the cat who had been returned to the shelter three times. That cat needed a forever home, and he was the one she decided to take back to live with us.

As this was our daughter’s cat – she got the right to name him. Frankly, I can’t remember whether this was a hard or easy job for her. But for a girl who had just recently reached double digits, I think she did an outstanding job.

She dubbed the lad Radcliffe Jellylorum. (Radcliffe after the Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe, and also for Radcliffe Emerson, an Egyptologist in a series of mystery books by Elizabeth Peters that our daughter had just started reading; and Jellylorum from T.S. Elliot’s remarkable poem, “The Naming of Cats.”) Radcliffe lived happily for many years in South Carolina and then moved with us to Arizona.

He watched bird TV out of the windows in South Carolina, and he watched bunny TV out the windows in Arizona. He was a kind and faithful cat!