YoYo was an orange tabby.  I’m partial to tabbies.  Barn cats in particular.  Indoor cats and purebreds are for sissies.  But having an outdoor cat does not come without its risks.  For one thing, outdoor cats don’t live as long. They get in fights, they get run over, and I guess some of them even run away. Or, if you’re YoYo, you just find out who in the neighborhood is offering canned food and you switch allegiances, just like that…  Ingrate.

I’m a dog and a cat person, which is rare.  One of the reasons this works is because I like cats who think and act like dogs. YoYo acted like a dog.  Have you seen the video of that cat that saved the little boy from the dog attack? Now that’s a cat I could like.

Where do I start with YoYo?  First of all, he was not my first choice.  I had picked out his litter mate when the kittens were not quite walking.  This one little guy would take a few baby steps with his front legs, stretching out his torso until he couldn’t go any further.  Then the back legs would sort of spring forward to catch up. I named him Slinky after the funny way he tried to walk.  Several weeks later when I went to pick him up and saw all the kittens playing together, I just could not bear for him to be an only cat.  I grabbed a litter mate and keeping with the toy motif, named him YoYo.

YoYo and Slinky went in and out our little pet door in the kitchen.  Once we got our Rottweiler, he did too until he got too big.  Then he would just put his head through and YoYo would torment him.  

One Sunday night when I got home from a girls weekend in Dallas, Slinky was missing.  I should know better than to go away for the weekend.  Bad things happen to our pets when I leave town. Slinky just never showed up.  I gave it a few days, and thinking that YoYo was lonely, I got  a gray tabby from the pound.  He was already named Wigglesworth. That was too much of a mouthful so we just called him “Willie”. It wasn’t long before he too disappeared and we began to question YoYo’s involvement.  About this time we moved to a new house and low and behold, a scrawny, mangy gray tabby came with the place.  Lacking any imagination at all, we named him Willie II.  Willie was a street cat and had balls, or so we thought.  Willie was on his home turf and YoYo was no match for him.  Only, it turns out he was a she.  Oh yea, it gets better…..