| 1. MARPLE and DELTA:
The Dynamic Duo Who Started It All
 Marple, outside at the Woodland Avenue house, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada.
Delta, outside at the house in Lewiston, New York: in her calendar pose; literally.
This pose got her into the U.S. Humane Society's 365-day calendar in 1991 when she was seven years old.
 Delta and Marple snooze together in the early years at Woodland Avenue.
 Delta at less than a year old: box and bag lover all her life.
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| | Excerpt from Chapter 1:
My parents each grew up on farms. They were used to horses, milk cows, chickens, a farm dog or two and miscellaneous barn cats. But dogs and cats were not animals you kept in the house. Their attitude translated to my own childhood. When I was a kid we had an outdoor dog. When it got cold, as it does near Chicago, Shaggy stayed out of the wind and in relative warmth and comfort lying on wood shavings in the inner room of the two-room insulated doghouse my did built for him. We also had a rabbit for a while, a hen and rooster and a couple of tame pigeons (which met their demise together when the half-wild teenaged sons of one of our neighbors shot them with their B-B gun). All of these animals lived outside. A few goldfish and a turtle could stay inside, of course. But there were no cats.
Finally, after my four older siblings were out of the house I convinced my dad that I really needed a cat, and that I would take good care of it. Enter Napoleon, an impressive all-black tom. I was enthralled. Then Napoleon got out one night, never to be seen again. I mourned.
My next cat encounter was with a brown female tabby, a kitten someone gave us. How I love brown tabbies! But she died of a mysterious illness after only a couple of years. I mourned her even more. My record with cats was 0-for-2, pretty abysmal.
It's hard to take care of a cat or any pet while you're in college. But once I graduated, acquired a teaching job and moved to Canada, that old and deep-seated yearning for a cat came back. Strongly.
At the time I was sharing a house with two friends, both of whom were also cat lovers. At a household powwow one night we agreed that we would like to adopt one of the kittens we'd seen advertised in the local paper. You know the kind of heartbreaking ad: "Free kittens to a good home." Heartbreaking because who knows what will happen to the poor things that aren't adopted? Probably nothing good.
The next night we drove down to take a look. The woman of the house led us into a finished basement. In a blanket-lined box was a mother cat. Tumbling about near her were four eight-week old kittens. Three were already spoken for, we were told. Well, that left us a lot of choice. The lone adoptable kitten was a brown tabby female with large green-yellow eyes more rounded than almond-shaped. She was immediately inquisitive; nosy, in fact. I was hooked and so were my friends. We happily took her home.
She wasn't the least bit fearful in exploring the much bigger space of our living room and bedrooms than she had yet seen in her short life. She scrounged around like a Victorian old aunt into everyone's business. She sniffed here, there and everywhere. As we watched her, amused, the three of us discussed what to name her. All at once we hit on it: we had been watching some of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple stories on public television. Our kitten would be Marple, Miss Marple, a feline version of Christie's snoopy but secretly savvy elderly woman detective. Our Marple would live up to the name, we felt sure. She loved prying into everything she encountered. But while she wasn't stupid by any means, she wasn't always cautious enough....
We soon decided we wanted Marple to have a litter of kittens before we would have her spayed. From childhood I had wanted the experience of having a pet that had babies, but it had never happened. Now, it could happen. [My friend and housemate] Margaret would keep one kitten (assuming Marple cooperated by getting pregnant). We contacted other friends ahead of time to make sure we would have homes for whatever other kittens there might be. We naively assumed that Marple would not have six or seven of them. Then we would have been in trouble. But we were young and foolish, and figured we had everything covered. That possibility didn't seem real to us and so it didn't unduly bother us.
Allowing a cat to go into heat is no dream come true. It's more like a nightmare, with banshee-like screaming. There is yowling and moaning, crying, off-key singing and general carrying-on. This is amplified at night and is guaranteed to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. Some of those feline utterances sound uncannily like a baby wailing. The bizarre sound effects are accompanied by antics that may be associated with derangement: amazing acrobatics, rolling on the floor in what appears to be a strange and painful ecstasy; arching the back, running back and forth through the house as if answering the call of some demon only she can hear the summons of.
We didn't want Marple to breed too early. It wouldn't be good for her to have kittens at too young an age, we thought. She went into heat at about five months old the first time, which is pretty normal. But we wanted her to be at least nine months old before we let her out to do her thing. How we survived her howling yearnings that first heat cycle I don't know. My mental state today may exhibit shaping by that event.
Round 2. The next time Marple was in heat we braced ourselves for more days of trauma, sound and fury. We didn't want her hooking up with just any old ugly tom, so we took matters in hand, so to speak. Another friend of ours knew someone who had a beautiful orange tom with a pleasant temperament. Orange Tom's owner was willing to offer Orange Tom's services so that Marple could produce a litter of the world's best kittens. So we made a date. But as some of you may be aware from personal experience, there are always potential problems with blind dates. And the potential became a reality. We took Marple down to the farm where Orange Tom lived. We put the nervous cats in a room together in the small barn there. Well, clearly Marple wasn't impressed with our choice of date for her. And pleasant Tom turned out to be a wimp.
He was keenly interested in her but she did not return the favor. Whenever he cautiously sidled near her she would try to smack him in the face and would then run to another corner of the room -- and he hadn't even made a real move yet. That dampened his spirit considerably. The rest of the time Marple and O.T. sat in their respective corners of the room each staring at some fascinating speck on the wall as if the other cat didn't exist.
After half an hour of this we got frustrated -- if they didn't -- and gave up. We scooped up Marple and put her back in the car, thanked Orange Tom's owner (who couldn't be held responsible for O.T.'s bumbling) and headed home. Our let's-let-Marple-have-kittens project was not working. We'd have to consider an alternative....
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