Twinkie Guts and Kitty Litter

This is Dante

Poolie's entry about her Twinkie cake inspired me to tell you a story about Twinkies and cat litter.

When Lovely Daughter got out of college she moved into an apartment and got a cat – that was the beginning of her feline zoo. Dante was a huge neutered male, part Siamese and part barn cat, I think. He had been neutered and then declawed as an adult, which made him somewhat on the grumpy side as I think he had been an outside cat at some point. He wanted nothing more than to spend time outside in the sunshine, and here he was cooped up in a third floor apartment.

Well, Lovely Daughter got married to a Marine and in the interim, while they were waiting for base housing, she moved back home with Dante. Because he was declawed (front only) we didn’t let him outside as we’ve just got too many critters around in the country just waiting to make a meal of declawed cats. After a couple of months her then husband was allocated base housing so she loaded up her car and headed east. Loading up her car consisted not only of her personal items, but also Dante and a litter box placed on the floor in the back seat.

Most cats aren’t good travelers, but Dante settled himself either in the back window or on the dash their first day out and watched the world go by. They stopped for the night somewhere in Ohio or Indiana, I don’t remember now, and took off early the next morning to complete their trip.

Now at that point in time Lovely Daughter wasn’t exactly into eating healthy, so she stopped to pick up breakfast, which consisted of a can of Coke and several Twinkies. She placed them on the passenger seat beside her. I don’t know what happened to Dante at this point in time, but he jumped from the back seat into the passenger seat, landed on the Twinkies which went whoosh when their plastic wrapping blew open, and then squish when all the cream center squeezed out and immediately went between his toes. The noise of the plastic blowing and the texture of the cream filling must have upset Dante. He jumped up on the dash, tracked the cream filling across it, wangled his way across Lovely Daughter into the back seat, down on the floor into the litter box where the litter stuck to the cream filling in his feet, back into the front seat and into the Twinkies again. Wash, rinse and repeat a number of times before she could get pulled off the turnpike and get him settled down and cleaned up.

Now she has Twinkie guts and cat litter from one end of the car to the other and all over her clothes, and has another full day of driving before she reaches her destination. Her ex-husband said it took him two full days to get all the Twinkie guts and litter out of her car.

So Dante moved into an apartment on base where he proceeded to let them know that he still didn’t like living inside and just wanted to be outside. They finally bought a cat harness and a leash and would stake him out in the front yard under a tree for periods of time. That made him a little bit happier.

Then we came for a visit (snicker). Ole decided that Dante needed a bit of exercise because he was getting pretty porky around the middle, so one day he started off down the sidewalk with the cat on a leash. Of course Dante didn’t know that he was supposed to get up and walk, so Ole would take a step, drag the cat, take a step, drag the cat. Dante eventually caught on, and that was the beginning of Devil Cat. From then on he didn’t want to be in the house at all. He would sit in the window and cry or lay in front of the apartment door so that you couldn’t get in or out without moving him.

When the ex-husband got out of the Marines and they moved back here of course Dante came along. They moved into their little house on the other side of our property and decided they would let Dante out on his own for short periods of time. Now this cat was no dummy. He had it figured out that they were both gone all day working so there was no one home to let him in or out. So he packed his little kitty suitcase and moved to my house where he could come and go as he pleased. From then on he was the happiest cat you could imagine. I think he went back to his barn cat roots and thoroughly enjoyed the remainder of his time on earth.

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Dante's favorite place to sleep was wrapped around my head. Believe me, when you're having a hot flash the last thing you need is a big cat covering your head!

Even though Dante was declawed in the front he could still climb trees. The only problem was that he could never figure out how to get down so Ole would end up rescuing him.