It is not a subtle thing to come down the stairs and see your wife and a good friend (Ellen) looking out a window and talking in low tones. I approached the pair and looked outside to see what they were observing. There, in my backyard, next to our unused sunroom, was a pile of kittens huddled together. Meredith explained that she and Ellen had been discussing on whether or not to tell me about the new felines since the odds were high that if I knew they were there then I would make it my mission to capture them for adoption purposes.

I think there were six kittens with a mama kitty nearby. Two immediately stood out to me – the run of the litter who was an all-black kitty with large ears. I pitied him as the runt and wanted to make an effort to get him. The other kitten that stood out was a beautiful explosively-fuzzy long haired kitten with a white chest. He was a little tub of a kitten, and so was clearly the alpha of the litter. I clearly needed to try to get him as well. Of course, any and all of the kittens were fair game to be captured and adopted, but the runt and the tiger were special to me.

My memory fails me after fifteen years. All of this happened back in June of 2011. We had plans with Ellen and so we went and did those plans, but I believe that later I made an attempt to catch the mound of kittens and failed utterly as they scattered as I approached. It did succeed in momma moving them somewhere.

Ellen returned home from her visit and a few days later I was walking to work when I could swear I heard a cat softly meowing, but I couldn’t see where it was coming from. I went on to work. The next morning I went around the corner of my neighbor’s house, which gave me a view of the back yard. The house was abandoned since the previous owner had died a few months before and I think a bank took possession. So it wasn’t a yard where I would expect to see any changes, but this morning I saw something new just off the back of the house near an old porch. Curious, I walked slowly over to the object, and it slowly resolved into a pile of kittens huddled together. As I got closer, they scattered, and the black runt ran into an open basement window.

This was a problem. I was worried that the kitten might have fallen on to the basement floor and wouldn’t be able to get out. So, I trespassed. I opened the window as wide as it would go and squeezed in through the tight opening, lowering myself blindly to the floor. I hear a fain mewing from the back of the basement, closest to the road. I walked over to the mewing and I found the cowering form of the fluffy tiger kitty. He must have been the crying I had heard the other day. He had made his way long the concrete sill of the basement about one-third of the way around, and I think he couldn’t figure out how to get back out. I caught him up in my hands, and let myself out the front door and brought him home. Thus, Alpha came to his home of fifteen years.

(As an aside, I went back and rescued the runt kitty, who came home with me while biting my hand the whole way. He is our cat Cesario.)

Alpha was an adorable kitten. He seemed to be made of fifty percent head. It took him a little time to warm to us (a couple of weeks), but he ended up being the sweetest cat we’ve ever had in our home. All the other cats, no matter how much they got on each other’s nerves, always loved Alpha and never fought with him.

In 2020, when I captured a tiger kitten on the open lot next to our house and brought him home, the kitten quickly came to love playing with Alpha. Alpha would patiently put up with the kitten trying to attack him, but usually held him off by extending a much-longer paw out to hold the exuberant kitten at bay.

Alpha grew into a stunning cat, and was a big boy. He loved his food and he grew into his large frame. He had a very fine fur that the vet termed “rabbit fur” and he had tons and tons of it. And then winter would hit and he would grow even more. His white chest hairs would grow double in size making an enormous ruff that stayed with Alphy all winter long.

Alpha wasn’t perfect, of course, but he was always cute. We found he liked to climb our artificial Christmas tree, and so after many bent branches under the ever-increasing weight of a big kitty, we made the switch to a deciduous (leaf instead of needle) tree that was bare-branched. That curbed Alpha’s tree climbing career.

Alpha loved string, to his own threat. I had a gyro ball that was wound up by string. One day, I couldn’t find the string that I had just had, and saw Alpha slurping down the last inch of a foot-long (or longer) string. I was worried it would get tangled in his intestines, but I was (somewhat) relieved to find the string in the litterbox a couple of days later. I threw it out.

When Alpha couldn’t find string, he would try to make his own. He would pick at beds and towels to loosen strings up so he could munch on them. We had to mount new and higher towel hooks in our bathroom so he couldn’t reach the towels. We had to be very vigilant to make sure our shows (with tempting laces) were always in closed closets. Our bed box springs all were picked over and fuzzy with fine strings for Alpha’s amusement.

Alpha’s one physical quirk was his eye. He had beautiful huge green eyes that made him look extra cute (we heard a study that big eyes provoke positive reactions in people). But, oddly, in his left eye the iris didn’t fully work. Half of the iris worked fine, but the other half was always fully open, so that in bright rooms one half of the eye was a slit and the other half was fully open. It must have been blindingly bright to Alpha, but he never let on that it bothered him at all.

As a young cat, Alpha used to have silent meows. He would open his mount and nothing would come out. That changed as he aged. He became quite vocal, especially in his last five years. He would meow loudly from the bathroom sink that was his favorite place and try to snag you as you walked by so you would pet him. He would also start reminding me that it was supper time when he thought it was time (usually 30-45 minutes earlier than the 3:00 feeding time).

Oddly, as Alpha aged, his stripes went away. He was still a striking brown and white cat, but no longer had his tiger stripes. I’ve never seen that happen in a cat before.
As a young cat, Alpha would come to me in the downstairs bedroom when I called to him if I were taking a nap. He would jump on the bed, settle in, and need and purr next to me. It was quite a wonderful way to drift off to sleep. In his later years, he generally stayed on his sink instead, but I loved his company for napping.

Meredith bribed Alpha with cat treats. When Alpha’s fine fur got tangled, we would use an electric razor to shave the tangle off of him. Mer would give him treats afterwards, and he always put up with it to get the food. The other cats started to associate the razor motor noise with treats and so would come running. Mer decided that Alpha should hunt his treats, and so she would scatter them on the floor and he would chase them. If another cat got near a treat, Alpha would shoot out his paw and cover it and drag it toward him.

A little over a year ago, Mer and I noticed that Alpha was getting thin. He had always been a big cat, so this seemed more than the usual aging-cat weight loss. We took him in to see the the vet and he was diagnosed with a thyroid issue that required he be given two pills a day for the rest of his life. He never regained any of his lost weight, but his weight loss stopped for about a year.

Alpha’s bloodwork tested fine at his last checkup a couple of months ago, but he looked to us to be getting skinnier. We were to take a trip to Sweden in early June, so we warned the cat sitter that we thought Alpha could pass away while we were gone because of how frail he had gotten. Happily, Alpha hung in there until we got home on Wednesday, June 17th. He was still frail, but still chased treats and was able to get on the sink. Thursday he seemed normal although he sought us out on the couch, which was rare over the last year. On Friday evening, I told Mer that I thought Alpha’s breathing was labored, but otherwise he seemed normal, so I decided to keep an eye on him. I woke up early on Saturday and tried to feed Alpha, but he wouldn’t eat anything, not even his treats. When Mer woke up a little later, I told her I thought it was time to put Alpha to sleep and to schedule the appointment for me while I was out running to clear my head. She did, and the vet was able to get us an appointment for the late morning on Saturday, and so we said goodbye to Alpha. He was a loving puff ball of a gentle cat, and so while he may not have been the Alpha male of the litter, he was the Alpha cat of my heart. I will miss him.

(Alpha, Alphy, Alphling Alph-Alph, Alphalfa, Alphadorable)

“Don’t tell Matthew,” I warned my friend Ellen, who was visiting from Michigan for the weekend. We’d just spotted movement outside the music room window and realized that five kittens were frolicking under the bushes as their mother watched. Matt and I already had three cats, and I wasn’t looking to add five more, adorable fluffballs though they were.

Of course, Matt saw them too, ’ere long; however, before he had a chance to capture them, Mama Cat had moved them somewhere else … which turned out to be the porch of the vacant house next door. One morning, when Matt was walking to work, he saw a pile of fur near its steps, and as he went to get a closer look, the fur split into Mama and kittens, one of whom fled to the “safety” of an open basement window. Worried about whether or not it could get back out again, Matt climbed through the same window and saw not only the black kitten he’d followed but another one as well, so he rescued them both.

Of the five in the litter, these two were the ones Matt confessed that he’d especially wanted, because the little black one seemed like the somewhat pitiable runt of the litter, and the other one was clearly the pick. We named them Alpha and Omega, Alpha as in “Alpha male,” and Omega because the black one was so runty that we wrongly thought at first it was a girl, so we were calling it “Meggie” for short.

It didn’t take us too long to realize that Alphy wasn’t really a true alpha male — rather than being dominant and assertive, he was skittish around strangers and generally pretty mellow around us and the other cats. But he certainly was dominant in the category of cuteness! He was a fat and fluffy tiger kitten who, as he grew up, lost his stripes but retained his strikingness. Most of his fur was a soft brown shade unusual for cats, but he had a white face, belly, and paws, except for his “dirty chin spot,” a small patch of darker fur under his jaw. A long-haired cat, he became extra fluffy in the winter, with a ginormous ruff. He had a little pink nose that was pale pink on some days and petal pink on others. His eyes were large and greenish-gold, and one of them we called his “freak eye,” because while cats’ pupils, like people’s, normally get larger in the dark and smaller in the light, one of Alphy’s pupils didn’t respond properly on one side, staying sizeable no matter what. He even had cute teeth: cats’ teeth are rarely noticeable, except for their fangs, but if you do try more deliberately to see them, they tend to be jagged and carnivorous-looking, whereas Alphy’s were these tiny little round pearls. His face was framed by long, beautiful white whiskers and brown ears that were fuzzy with a layer of lighter fur. Plus, he was cute auditorily as well as visually. For many years, he wouldn’t really meow, but his mouth would open as if he were trying to; we called it the “silent squeak.” He always had a terrific purr, loud and rumbly, but with a rusty note to it that made it particularly distinctive. And he was a big boy, over fifteen pounds for most of his life, and close to twenty at his peak. We said that it took a lot of cat to hold that much cute.

Dinner time was the one occasion on which he regularly demonstrated more alpha-male tendencies, reminding us when it was time for him to eat and nudging his siblings from their plates once he’d finished what was on his own. His appetite proved somewhat handy for us, though, with regard to attempting to keep him groomed: to try to keep his fur lump-free, we’d occasionally (and then more frequently, as he got older) shave the lumps out with an electric razor, but since we’d always give him treats afterwards, he’d fairly patiently put up with having a lump or two shaved first. In fact, we didn’t even have to hunt him down to shave him — when he heard the razor, he’d come to us. I always liked to toss the treats a few feet away, instead of just giving them to him, because I think he enjoyed “hunting” the treats. It didn’t take his feline siblings long to figure out that if they showed up when he was being shaved, they might get some treats too … but only if Alphy didn’t snag the treats before they did. If they were hovering too hesitantly over a treat, Alphy’d shoot his paw out as if he were playing Hungry, Hungry Hippos and take it for himself.

Alphy was a great cat year-round, but I think of him as our Christmas cat, since he enjoyed sitting under the tree (or in it, until we decided that that tree had gotten a bit too bedraggled and replaced it with one less conducive to being climbed) or among the figures of our nativity set. When Matt took a picture of him looming over the shepherds and wise men, we captioned it “What ruffed beast slouches toward Bethlehem…?”

I’m sure that Alphy would also have enjoyed playing with the ribbons on Christmas presents, but we didn’t give him the chance. We learned early in our time with him that he had a strange string fetish, and would eat it if ever given the opportunity. Since this is bad for cats’ digestive systems, not to mention for humans’ possessions, we quickly got in the habit of always putting shoes with laces or clothing with straps out of his reach. He turned his attention to becoming the Terror of the Towels, which is why the towel hooks in our bathroom are hung abnormally high (and have another set of hooks beneath them, that proved not high enough). We gave up on bathmats and just stepped onto hand towels that we put back over the shower curtain rod before leaving the bathroom. On the plus side, his proclivities did help us get better at putting clothing away efficiently rather than letting it linger in laundry baskets.

Alphy’s most noteworthy string triumph came when he was on the couch while Matt and I were watching TV. Matt had bought this doodad that, if I recall correctly, was supposed to help strengthen hand and arm muscles, and it involved a bright red pull-cord … or at least, it did until Alphy snarfed said cord while our attention was distracted by the screen. Perhaps my memory deceives me, but I’m picturing that cord’s being a minimum of a foot long and about a third of an inch thick, and it had just disappeared. Suffice it to say that we were relieved when it reappeared (in the litter box, a couple days later). When Matt audited my creative writing class and the students had to write a description of their rooms, Matt cleverly described our bedroom from Alphy’s perspective, titling his piece “String Theory.”

Although Alphy’s string fascination could be both annoying and worrisome, he was otherwise a pretty great cat. He wasn’t the most consistently lap-snuggly kitty we’ve ever had, but he was affectionate and clearly liked to be around us. The most amusing demonstration of this came when Matt and I were taking swing dance lessons: we would shove the couches and coffee table back to make a dance-floor space in our living room so that we could practice the moves we were learning, and whenever Alphy heard us doing this, he’d race into the room so that he could be right underfoot.

Alphy also liked to be around his siblings. For the multiple cats we adopted after him, he was always our “first-contact kitty,” since he was laid back enough that all the others seemed to get along with him. He had a particularly strong bond with Folio, who joined our home as a small kitten. Whenever Alphy would go down to the food dish to eat, Foley would join him so that they could eat together.

Not surprisingly, Foley became a bit of a chunk himself; a couple years ago, however, we noticed that Alphy was getting thinner and thinner. He’d also essentially taken up residence on the bathroom sink’s countertop. While we missed having him within snuggling reach on the couch or in bed, we’re in the bathroom often enough that we got to see a lot of him. He pretty much only left to eat, drink, or go to the bathroom — or to avoid The Nemesis (what we called the hairdryer … but since I usually air dry my hair, he didn’t have to confront The Nemesis on the daily). It sometimes got inconvenient for me to try to reach the faucet, set down my curling iron, etc., with Alphy’s often being in the way. And the white countertop perpetually had paw prints on it. At the same time, I could see that Alphy’s health was declining, so I was grateful for all the interactions that we had, even the inconvenient ones.

When we got alarmed by Alphy’s weight loss, we took him to the vet, who put Alphy on thyroid medication that we (usually Matt) administered faithfully for over a year, crushing up pills to put in the extra food we’d give him. He still ate eagerly, and seemed to enjoy his life, limited in scope though it had become … but even with the pills and the extra food, he just wasn’t putting on weight. In addition, he was losing the grooming battle, with new fur clumps emerging faster than we could keep them shaved.

Just recently, he finally lost interest in food, though we tried all of his former favorites and some new ones besides. We started wondering if it was time to make that fateful final trip to the vet. When his breathing started to become a bit labored, we decided it was.

The sink is cleaner, and has more available counter space — but I wish it didn’t. I still habitually keep putting towels and lace-up shoes out of kitty reach. And Matt and I keep forgetting to feed the cats at their usual time, because Alphy’s no longer here to remind us.

He wasn’t an alpha male in the typical sense. But he was a dominant force of love and joy in our lives for fifteen years, and I’m so grateful.