THE RESCUE OF STRAY CATS : NUDNIK, IS A NUDNIK

Rescue of Stray Cats

by Paul Schroeder

My cats who live with me, are only two I have brought inside, of dozens of kittens I have rescued from my backyard and handed over, to willing others over the years.

Dozens of cats are born on the farm next to me.

The Queens Museum Farm, an historic twenty acre working farm, in New York, has

greenhouses, flocks of chickens, a yard of pigs, several cows , two dogs, many cats, noisy

guard-dog-like peacocks, a large victory garden, several llamas, donkeys, horses and a half-dozen sheep.

Cows give low moos, aching to be milked, at dawn, singing birds chirp and warble in clouds of

wings that fill the trees, and at dusk and dawn, roosters ca-ca-doodle-do in

its fenced perimeter, less than one hundred feet from my backyard.

In the tall grass fields, among goats, sheep and cows grazing, feral feline queens drop

litters of four to six kittens, every seven weeks, and sooner or later show them my backdoor

which always sports a bowl of water, and a plate of cat-food.

A frail black kitten who cried on and off all day, abandoned under a nearby woodpile on

a rainy day, was left by his mother and not returned for.

It took my son and me over an hour to first locate the cries and then to remove the

virtual ton of lumber precariously perched , under which his mother had left him.

He had cried plaintively for hours, wet, cold and frightened but hidden too cleverly to

easily reach.

He was so hungry still not weaned, that he bit off the rubber nipples on the small kitten

bottles I fed him with, swallowing rubber that made me rush him to the vet .

He was barely four weeks old, but I held him on my warm chest for him to hear the

familiar solace of a heartbeat, and I talked to him, at great lengths; he was one I didn’t

succeed, though I tried, to give away, but he was instead lovingly cared for, hand raised.

This frail kitten evolved into a Daffy- Duck- difficult- to- live- with-nature, a ‘lid off the Id’,

feline nightmare who grew to monstrous proportions, who bites and scratches at the slightest wrongly perceived provocation.

He was symbolically difficult from the very beginning; it took us almost an hour to

unload that large teetering stack of planking woodpile, behind a neighbor’s shed, to

finally locate him in pouring rain.

Though unseen, he’d been heard for hours, well-hidden, to cry and cry and cry..

His mother, well within sight and earshot, patently refused to come to him, to comfort or

retrieve him, from where she had carried and hid him, and for a good reason.

Male cats were marauding nearby and she knew that by feline male nature, they’d

slaughter the kittens, and then wait for her dugs to grow dry of milk, and go back, into heat.

Then, they would mate with her, assured that the next litter would be theirs, a sperm

war of jungle DNA mentality.,

She had cleverly hidden them all, everywhere, so that marauding toms, couldn’t get at them.

I weaned him, doctored his ailments and assuaged his angst.

I rocked him to sleep, on my chest, accompanied with lullabies, three times a day for years.

Now, in his seventh year as a twenty-two pound neutered black tomcat , he has earned his name, Nudnick.

Though he grew into a cat of monstrous proportions with an aggressive ilk, he loudly and

plaintively insists on being ‘tucked in’, like a young child, requiring squeezes with hugs

and kisses ,

before he will settle in to sleep.

(Nudnick, is Russian, for an annoying, boring, persisting and irritating pain in the

derriere, personality. )

He is tall and large boned, an enormous pure alpha male with a huge square head who

affectionately and jealously loves our family with his head banging, deeply jealous of my

other cat, a doddering senior female, of tiny physical proportions, who hates him.

Squeaky, is the oldest rescue cat I ever found deserted: feeble, senile, on antibiotics, a

twenty-two year old ailing but purring, shriveled feline,

tiny, under five pounds, with glazed over eyes ,

who walks in lost circles of dementia,

an elder cat without teeth or claws, unable in any way to fight back, against Nudnick, a

jealous aggressor.

When Nudnik sees Squeaky getting required medication with commensurate

affection, consumed with jealousy,-(he has core abandonment issues)-, he feels compelled to jump onto her to bite her.

You can see his eyes grow large with pain, when he sees that she is being cared for.

Because of jealousy, Nudnik tortures her and this, in turn infuriates me, which only fuels

his jealousy.

She walked into my living room from my back garden years ago, to claim us, a stray lost

and she rolled around on the floor in grateful pleasure and sat perched in our laps to

thank us.

Now, she’s a twenty-two year old, frail, striped tabby, who faces an unsettled old age ,

because an adopted kitten ballooned into a vengeful King Kong.

Since, she like a vocal chord altered cat from a laboratory, could muster only a high

pitched chirp, I had named her, Squeaky.

I wondered who had lost her and what quantum of love had been lost.

The vet volunteered to euthanize her, for she was old and in bad shape,

but I said that we would mend and adopt her, instead.

It seemed a betrayal, for she had shown a poignant gratefulness, a recognition of her own self-rescue.

Nudnik tackles and torpedoes her mercilessly, whenever she tries to move from

her bed to the litter box, and makes her transit anywhere, Hellish .

I had caged him for periods, when we were out and about, to insure her safety.

No emotional nor copying bonding ever occurred between them.

She had survived for a long time in the elements, but now rescued, seem to age quickly.

It was an ungraceful, dreadful old age retirement for her, because of Nudnik, who

Frustrated,

I have admonished a thousands times, but he is truly, a Nudnik.

Once a nudnik , always a nudnik.

He exhibits his nudnick nature when he tries to steal a leather recliner chair from

under me,

(“One cat, leads to another” (Ernest Hemingway)

when I am comfortably perched within its embrace.

He will jump up, get behind me on the chair, and bully me, physically nudge and push

me, followed up with bites to my arms to force me out of the chair.

I shake my head disapprovingly and tell him, ” Forget about it!” , firmly,

When that fails, he leaves the room and knocks something loudly to the floor in an

adjacent room, to get me up to investigate, and when I do, he then runs into my chair.

Should that fail to work

he will then leave the room, and cry repeatedly, from a nearby room, plaintively.

When I am halfway there, he runs in at full tilt, or slowly swaggers in, a form of cat

smugness, jumps up to steal my chair, supplants me, and stretches out in the warmth

imparted by my body.

One can see some logical deviousness in his methods ; he has worked this out in his big headed little mind.

I have never before hand raised a cat, from a tiny kitten,

and He, alone, has given me more trouble than any collection, ensemble of cats , combined, that I have ever rescued.

His cat rules:

‘

Always give generously. A small bird or rodent left on the bed tells them, I care.
Climb your way to the top. That’s why the drapes are there.
Curiosity never killed anything except maybe a few hours.
Find your place in the sun. Especially if it happens to be on that nice pile of warm, clean laundry.
If you’re not receiving enough attention, try knocking over several expensive antique lamps.
Life is hard, then you nap.
Make your mark in the world.
Or at least spray in each corner.
Never sleep alone when you can sleep on someone’s face.’
There’s no denying the splendidness of felines:
I recall a graphic in the “New Yorker”, where a well-dressed, neatly groomed man,
stands over a litter box, arms akimbo, to directly address a cat nearby his feet and
the caption read:
” Never, EVER think , outside the box!”

GHOSTS AND CATS OF BLOCK ISLAND

by Paul Schroeder

Block Island, an oasis off the coast of Rhode Island, is where I have spent time musing and walking.

Ghosts, seen on Block Island are only part of the paranormal show, in town.

One late September, almost October, I and my wife stayed at the hotel 1661 INN at Old Harbor on Block Island for a week to celebrate a vacation where

we enjoyed an island off season, bereft of tourists from the mainland to watch an island gear down from summer and close up in preparation for the winter.

Only a few bird watchers clubs frequented the island then, for the weather was windy, cold, blustery and rainy,

storms which added to our desire to stay close to the inn and in each other’s close company.

One stormy and windy evening at ten o’clock in the evening, I went out to the backyard of the inn, tacitly to watch the view of whitecaps roiling on Old Harbor and to socialize with a pair of goats, which roamed freely on the property.

Out on the harbor, a quarter of a mile from the shore among the rolling whitecaps, I saw a flickering, blue triangular light that vanished and then reappeared a short distance from where it had been.

At first glance, it looked like the angular sail and mast of a middle sized sailing craft, a craft in distress that struggled to make headway in the stormy waters, except that this sail radiated a surreal phosphorescent light, a glow that ebbed and waned like a dying flame .

The bluish sail’s color glowed in a purplish light and then vanished completely, only to reappear another short distance from where it was last sighted.

I initially surmised it to be a flame above the waves from ignited methane from the ocean floor.

I watched in wonder as its shifting movements made it jump from one location to another location every few seconds; its odd flickering flame glowing in a surreal sailboat triangular form, was something I’d never seen before.

It vanished completely, after a few minutes among the stormy waves, as though it had finally capsized .

The image of that strange vessel has haunted my memory for many years,

a famous Block Island ghost ship seen often in stormy weathers, by many others before and after me.

However, not until recently, some years later, having read “Livermore’s History of Block Island”, did I realize that the book’s description of an oddly lit and shifting Palatine Ghost Ship seen off Block Island is precisely what I caught and observed that windy white capped and rain swept evening.

Other ghostly goings-on prevail, there.

A woman seen carrying a clock, and observed talking to herself, is another famous full bodied apparition; she seemingly ignores the greetings of a rare tourist, on a deserted stretch of road at the far end of the island, and then, clock in hand, she suddenly vanishes.

Even odder, some Block Island ghost stories are still in the making.

(from a communique from a friend):

“I was fishing off Misquamicut Beach in Rhode Island in 1995. I was in a boat, and we watched a big cloud of smoke appear off Block Island in the distance.

What happened was that an airplane crashed into a restaurant.”

It appears that a young child, a wife and a doctor and his mother all perished en route,

in a small aircraft just before landing at Westerly Airport on Block Island.

The small plane hit a restaurant taking an additional islander life;

one small airstrip lay 500 feet parallel to a line of three coastal restaurants.

Block Island, an off-season haunt for me, now has the addition of these ghosts, for the dead often remain at the site of their violent death, ghostly additions to a place already most assuredly haunted.

There is resident talk of ghosts seen on the island, especially those spirits restless and active at the Old Town Inn, a hotel location, geographically central to the island.

I would often prefer to stay at the Old Town Inn, inspired by the stories of its often seen ghosts.

History indeed confirms that a State Senator who lived there in the early 1800’s, faced charges that he murdered his ailing mother for his inheritance, by throwing her down the long narrow stairway, a stairway still in evidence.

I surmise that he was acquitted.

But the staircase and basement area judge fate and history differently.

The owner told me that he had seen the bare bulb in the basement often spin of its own accord; it kept him and mainland workmen away from that basement.

Most locals were too leery an ilk to spend any real, required time down there, doing some essential repairs.

When restorations had initially begun, it had been noticed that all interior doors had been removed; when the new owners had queried contractors why this had been done, a disturbing answer had been returned.

The many doors’ constant opening and closing by themselves had unnerved, distracted and unsettled the mainland workmen.

They had removed the doors, and erased these house symptoms, but touched not the disease, itself.

Guests have asked the front desk about a ghostly woman, seen from their upstairs windows, a spectre who has walked in the deeper shadows of the garden at night, in a pink, long, flowing gown, who has carried a pink parasol.

She can be seen in the back garden, under a full moon, late at night, when weather conditions are perfect.

I would stay here on Block Island, despite its ghosts, because it was far from scenic views of the harbor, and from crowds of daily ferried tourists.

This central location on Block Island allowed me to be more reclusive in my wanderings, far from people, which was my nature.

I wandered among persimmon trees, apple and wild plum, across vacant meadows and fields whose scattered vestigial remnants of ancient stone foundation fragments revealed where houses once stood.

On one such long walk, a deer froze in a field to then bolt from view and

on my return to the Inn, on that same cold, windy afternoon, I saw a cat

quickly scurry under the foundation of the hotel, a cat as orange in color as the drifting early October Maple leaves.

Only the feral cats who roam the streets of Block Island know its ghosts as permanent residents, lost and not yet found.

Block Island’s feral cats, independent and grateful creatures, like solitary ghosts, have astonished me in the oddest ways.

Whenever New York City snow drifts high enough to seal all the doors and windows of February, I conjure an image of frozen kittens cuddling in the Rhode Island icy snow.

That image haunts me, though I’ve never seen it.

I was informed when I inquired at the inn, that she was feral and would have to over winter on the island alone, that she belonged to no one and had recently had a litter somewhere under the cellar.

The staff, who took pity on her and who fed her, would soon leave by early November.

The hotel wouldn’t re-open until mid April; in deep winter snows, with a new litter of kittens, she would be on her own.

I was moved to go into town to buy some canned cat food and these I presented to the kitchen staff who cared for her.

I was told that I could

feed her myself, as she was just outside the kitchen, awaiting a handout..

I opened two cans and spoke to her, watched her as she fed.

I wondered aloud to the kitchen staff what fate might bring to those kittens when heavy winter snow lay against the outside of those abandoned

kitchen doors, all winter long.

Later, about ten o’clock in the evening, I heard a knock on my door that stopped my writing and upon opening the door, I found the chef outside, smiling warmly.

He asked me if I could follow him down to the kitchen.

She had, he said, been grateful to me and had brought me a ‘thank you’ gift, in eloquent cat artistry.

A large, dead marsh rat lay by the back kitchen door, fully displayed, on the welcome mat.

Puffed up and very proud, she paraded back and forth over it, purring and repeatedly making eye contact with me.

She had caught it and then she had brought it to me, as thanks, but also as a token.

It had somewhat assuaged my anxieties about her and her broods’ chances of survival, facing an icy cruel winter, with no food, alone on the island with only ghosts, as her company..

I recall that cat’s unflawed nature, uncomplaining and noble and hershow of gratitude and
courageous

resiliency, unfurling her fearlessness.

Ghosts and cats who roam Block Island would wander alone in the coming ice storms,

and she, bereft of food,

with new and hungry kittens to feed, would face a winter

of killing blizzards.

THE RESCUE OF STRAY CATS : A NUDNIK IS A NUDNIK

Rescue of Stray Cats

by Paul Schroeder

My catS who live with me, are only two I have brought inside, of dozens of kittens I have rescued from my backyard and handed over, to willing others over the years.

Dozens of cats are born on the farm next to me.

The Queens Museum Farm, an historic twenty acre working farm, in New York, has greenhouses, flocks of chickens, a yard of pigs, several cows , two dogs, several cats, noisy guard-dog-like peacocks, and a half-dozen sheep.

Cows low moos, aching to be milked, at dawn, singing birds chirp and warble in clouds of wings that fill the trees, and at dusk and dawn, roosters ca-ca-doodle-do within

Its fenced perimeter, less than 100 feet from my backyard.

In the tall grass fields, among goats, sheep and cows grazing, feral feline queens drop litters of four to six kittens, every seven weeks, and sooner or later show them my backdoor

which always sports a bowl of water, and a plate of cat-food.

A frail black kitten who cried on and off all day, abandoned under a nearby woodpile on a rainy day, was left by his mother and not returned for.

It took my son and me over an hour to first locate the cries and then to remove the virtual ton of lumber precariously perched , under which his mother had left him.

He had cried plaintively for hours, wet, cold and frightened but hidden too cleverly to easily reach.

He was so hungry still not weaned, that he bit off the rubber nipples on the small kitten bottles I fed him with, swallowing rubber that made me rush him to the vet .

He was barely four weeks old, but I held him on my warm chest for him to hear the familiar solace of a heartbeat, and I talked to him, at great lengths; he was one I didn’t succeed, though I tried, to give away, but he was instead lovingly cared for, hand raised.

This frail kitten evolved into a Daffy- Duck- difficult- to- live- with-nature, a ‘lid off the Id’, feline nightmare who grew to monstrous proportions, who bites and scratches at the slightest mis-perceived provocation.

He was symbolically difficult from the very beginning; it took us almost an hour to unload that large teetering stack of planking woodpile, behind a neighbor’s shed, to finally locate him in pouring rain.

Though unseen, he’d been heard for hours, well-hidden, to cry and cry and cry..

His mother, well within sight and earshot, patently refused to come to him, to comfort or retrieve him, from where she had carried and hid him, and for a good reason.

Male cats were marauding nearby and she knew that by feline male nature, they’d slaughter the kittens, and then wait for her dugs to grow dry of milk, and go back, into heat.

Then, they would mate with her, assured that the next litter would be theirs, a sperm war of jungle DNA mentality.,

She had cleverly hidden them all, everywhere, so that marauding toms, couldn’t get at them.

I weaned him, doctored his ailments and assuaged his angst.

I rocked him to sleep, on my chest, accompanied with lullabies, three times a day for years.

Now, in his seventh year as a twenty-two pound neutered black tomcat , he has earned his name, Nudnick.

Though he grew into a cat of monstrous proportions with an aggressive ilk, he loudly and plaintively insists on being ‘tucked in’, like a young child, requiring squeezes with hugs and kisses ,
before he will settle in to sleep!

(Nudnick, is Russian, for an annoying, boring, persisting and irritating pain in the derriere, personality. )

He is tall and large boned, an enormous pure alpha male with a huge square head who affectionately and jealously loves our family with his head banging, deeply jealous of my other cat, a doddering senior female, of tiny physical proportions, who hates him.

Squeaky, is the oldest rescue cat I ever found deserted: feeble, senile, on antibiotics, a twenty-two year old ailing but purring, shriveled feline,

tiny, under five pounds, with glazed over eyes ,

who walks in lost circles of dementia,

an elder cat without teeth or claws, unable in any way to fight back, against Nudnick, a jealous aggressor.

When Nudnik sees Squeaky getting required medication with commensurate affection, consumed with jealousy,-(he has core abandonment issues)-, he feels compelled to jump onto her to bite her.

You can see his eyes grow large with pain, when he sees that she is being cared for.

Because of jealousy, Nudnik tortures her and this, in turn infuriates me, which only fuels his jealousy.

She walked into my living room from my back garden years ago, to claim us, a stray lost and she rolled around on the floor in grateful pleasure and sat perched in our laps to thank us.

Now, she’s a twenty-two year old, frail, striped tabby, who faces an unsettled old age , because an adopted kitten ballooned into a vengeful King Kong.

Since, she like a vocal chord altered cat from a laboratory, could muster only a high pitched chirp, I had named her, Squeaky.

I wondered who had lost her and what quantum of love had been lost.

The vet volunteered to euthanize her, for she was old and in bad shape,

but I said that we would mend and adopt her, instead.

It seemed a betrayal, for she had shown a poignant gratefulness, a recognition of her rescue.

Nudnik tackles and torpedoes her mercilessly, whenever she tries to move from

her bed to the litter box, and makes her transit anywhere, Hellish .

I had caged him for periods, when we were out and about, to insure her safety,

afraid that I’d come home to find her murdered and afraid that, I ‘d find it hard to really forgive love Nudnick..

Her life was wrecked by Nudnik and to protect her we caged him whenever we went out, in an attempt to protect senile Squeaky from persistent Alpha male assaults.

It was an ungraceful, dreadful old age retirement for her, because of Nudnik, who

Frustrated,

I have admonished a thousands times, but he is truly a Nudnik.

Once a nudnik , always a nudnik.

He exhibits his nudnick nature when he tries to steal a leather recliner chair from under me,

(“One cat, leads to another” (Ernest Hemingway)

when I am comfortably perched within its embrace.

He will jump up, get behind me on the chair, and bully me, physically nudge and push me, followed up with bites to my arms to force me out of the chair.

I shake my head disapprovingly and tell him, ” Forget about it!” , firmly,

When that fails, he leaves the room and knocks something loudly to the floor in an adjacent room, to get me up to investigate, and when I do, he then runs into my chair.

Should that fail to work, .

he will then leave the room, and cry repeatedly, from a nearby room, plaintively.

When I am halfway there, he runs in at full tilt, or slowly swaggers in, a form of cat smugness, jumps up to steal my chair, supplants me, and stretches out in the warmth imparted by my body.

One can see some logical deviousness in his methods ; he has worked this out in his big headed little mind.

I have never before hand raised a cat, from a tiny kitten, to discover a neurotic Nudnik!

He, alone, has given me more trouble than any collection, ensemble of cats , combined, that I have ever rescued.

His cat rules:

‘

Always give generously. A small bird or rodent left on the bed tells them, I care.
Climb your way to the top. That’s why the drapes are there.
Curiosity never killed anything except maybe a few hours.
Find your place in the sun. Especially if it happens to be on that nice pile of warm, clean laundry.
If you’re not receiving enough attention, try knocking over several expensive antique lamps.
Life is hard, then you nap.
Make your mark in the world.
Or at least spray in each corner.
Never sleep alone when you can sleep on someone’s face.’
There’s no denying the splendid natures of felines:
I recall a graphic in the “New Yorker”, where a well-dressed, neatly groomed man, stands over a litter box, arms akimbo, to directly address a cat nearby his feet and
the caption read:
” Never, EVER think , outside the box!”

CATS AND GHOSTS OF BLOCK ISLAND

GHOSTS AND CATS OF BLOCK ISLAND

by Paul Schroeder

Block Island, an oasis off the coast of Rhode Island, is where I have spent time musing and walking.Ghosts, seen on Block Island are only part of the paranormal show, in town.

One late September I and my wife stayed at the hotel 1661 INN at Old Harbor on Block Island for a week to celebrate a vacation where

we enjoyed an island off season, bereft of tourists from the mainland to watch an island gear down from summer and close up in preparation for the winter.

Only a few bird watchers clubs frequented the island then, for the weather was windy, cold, blustery and rainy,

storms which added to our desire to stay close to the inn and in each other’s close company.

Out on the harbor, a quarter of a mile from the shore among the rolling whitecaps, I saw a flickering, blue triangular light that vanished and then reappeared a short distance from where it had been.

The bluish sail’s color glowed in a purplish light and then vanished completely, only to reappear another short distance from where it was last sighted.

I initially surmised it to be a flame above the waves from ignited methane from the ocean floor.I watched in wonder as its shifting movements made it jump from one location to another location every few seconds; its odd flickering flame glowing in a surreal sailboat triangular form, was something I’d never seen before.