This is a true story. All of the names in this story have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved, except for George, for whom I recieved special permission from the George the Cat Foundation to use his real name and life’s story.
So basically I was homeschooled K-12, but except for the last bit of my senior year because of Covid and some other stuff, it was never at home. It was kind of a church school with at least a few of us, and for a good portion of it we were allowed to hold school in this three room building on the church property, that was built about 1960. It was old and had all sorts of electrical issues and other stuff, but like all old building, it should be noted that it had mice…
One day, one particularly daring mouse had the brilliant idea to run under a desk. Not just any desk, but the desk of basically the head of the school and supervisor of my class, “Mrs. R”. (I hope you get to meet Mrs. R someday as she is one of those people who you have to either love, or she drives you crazy, or sometimes a little both at the same time.) As can be imagined, this didn’t sit well with Mrs. R, and we had quite a commotion trying to catch and kill the mouse. We were unsuccessful. A few weeks passed from that day, and one day she reveals her master plan to eradicate the mice. “Edward”, one of my best friends and her son, walks in carrying the tiniest kitten I have ever seen in the palm of his hand. Since it’s sort of his cat, because he’s already deeply attached to it, it was only fair that he should name it. So I asked him what it was to be called and he said unintelligible (he’s always had slight difficulty pronouncing things, which usually causes no problem, but this time I genuinely could not understand what he was trying to say.) So I asked him to write it down, and he writes on a piece of paper, c-h-a-s-i-s, which of course spells “chasis” like the thing under a car. Now in retrospect, it’s quite possible that he meant Cassy, but since I had no clue what to call this thing, and didn’t want to offend him by mispronouncing the name of the cat that he named, I decided to call it “school cat” or simply “the cat”, a name which could never possibly lead to any confusion, and which unfortunately stuck much better than Cassy. It should be noted at this point, by the gender of the name Edward intended to call the cat, that the cat in question was female…
Time passes, and School Cat gets slightly, but not much bigger. And not any better at catching mice, which is to say she didn’t catch mice. However, being a female cat, she did attract a male suitor. Since we already had one cat that was difficult enough to take care of, another one would probably not make things much better. And, because of the way these things work if we kept both of these cats, we would not only have two cats, but many kittens as well. So at the end of the day I took this male cat and walked as far as I cared to down the dirt road that our building was on, and dropped him off in the woods, hoping he would find his way to someone who would feed and take care of him. As I was walking back to my truck at the school building, I was greeted by the friendly “meow” of the cat that I had just dropped off about a mile down the road. He had beaten me back. At this point I decided that this was a problem for tomorrow and went home…
When school was out the next day, I grabbed him in one hand and the steering wheel of my trusty little Chevy S-10 pickup in the other and drove to the end of that dirt road, said my goodbyes and promptly tossed the cat into the woods. Just to make sure, I drove by the school building on my way home just to make sure he was not back. He was not.
The next morning, we were greated by the friendly face that I had the previous day hoped to be rid of, that being this male cat. Since it was obvious by now that we were not going to be rid of this cat anytime soon, we need something to call the cat. Since we already have a cat called “the cat”, it would not be practical to keep calling this cat “cat”, and be confused by which cat we mean when we say “cat”, therefore I use the first name that I think of that I don’t closely know anyone by at the time, which happened to be “George”. But of course we have to keep Gorge and the school cat separate at all times to avoid an unwanted biology lesson for the younger in the school, and to avoid having even more cats to worry about.
Mrs. R has a few children besides Edward, one of which was named “Penelope”, and had recently moved out and into a old house that their family had inherented. As mentioned previously, old buildings tend to have mice, but if they have mice for too long they attract snakes, which eat the mice. So Penelope was concerned, and not without reason, because they had recently found a few decently sized snakes in her new house. So my buddy Edward, manages to solve a problem in a few words, which I wasn’t able to solve in in several weeks and many miles. He tells Penelope that cats will kill snakes. So Penelope wants a cat and we happen to have one, named George, readily available. So George moves in with Penelope.
So by now it’s the last day of school for the year, and nobody will be at this school building until school starts again in the fall. So we need to do something with the school cat. So Mrs. R knows somebody who needs a cat, Penelope. So either with Penelope’s permission or not, I’m not sure, they give Miss Penelope another cat, the ex-school cat, and the first big news I hear that summer is that George and Cassy (school cat) were expecting kittens. So that just goes to show that George was persistent, and won out in the end.
And that was the story of how I accidentally named a cat George.
George the cat passed away recently, so I’m told, and it was a sad day for all involved. He is survived by his widow, Cassy/Chasis/The School Cat who honors his legacy by bearing more and more kittens by various suitors, continuing the problem that we could not solve - that of too many cats. To my knowledge none of them have ever caught a mouse.
Duscuss posts at r/theScH_blog.
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