Toby the Unteachable Cat

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Toby was just a wee kitten when Charles brought him home from the animal hospital. His coat was tortoise shell design and he had bright big eyes and perky ears. Julie, our daughter, named him Toby. Right away her brother William and his friends renamed the cat Ybot. Seeing that Julie was irritated, the boys teased her even more. They hid Toby in a dark closet, lifted him high as if offering him to the moon, and were always ready to pick fights with the feisty little cat. Maybe all that boyish attention is what made Toby/Ybot so unteachable, so roguish.

I’d never known a cat who couldn’t learn that it wasn’t permissible to stroll around the kitchen counter taking nibbles of whatever they wanted. But that was Toby. No amount of scoldings, exiles to the outdoors, water sprays, even spankings made one dent in his determination to try whatever appeared on the dining table. He regularly climbed the curtains, too, and ambushed me with sharp claws as I walked past a bed.

He was a cute cat, no doubt about that. I can just see him now poking his little face out from under a straw hat one of the children put over him. But I can also see him looking up with mischievous amusement from licking a nice new stick of butter making sure to leave tongue prints on the butter and footprints on the tablecloth. There wasn’t anything Toby wouldn’t try. He licked tomatoes, tore into a loaf of bread, and made himself totally comfortable on top of the refrigerator where he could pounce on an unlucky passerby (mainly me).

The only way to put dinner safely on the table was to set someone in charge of keeping Toby on the floor. I guess Tom and Margaret, guests of ours, didn’t quite understand their instruction. From the kitchen I heard hilarious laughter. When I rounded the corner to see what the joke was, there was Toby in the middle of the table helping himself greedily to a piece of fried chicken.

Unfortunately, Toby didn’t learn his outdoors lessons any better than he learned his table manners. He couldn’t be happy just birding and squirreling in his own yard. No, he was prone to cross the street to investigate the pecan orchard where he could chase lots of squirrels up the trees.

One morning after the kids had gone to school, I found Toby smashed and bloody, dead in the street. I scooped him up and sobbed as I hauled him to the pet cemetery beyond the fig tree. When I broke the news to Julie that afternoon, we both cried over his little grave. The boys were somber and I caught them wiping their eyes on their sleeves.

We loved that cat. No matter how unteachable and mischievous he was, we loved him dearly and still talk about him fondly. Thinking about him, I’m reminded of how thankful I am that God loves me too, in spite of all my faults.