Rolly’s
Tale
…true
stories…
By
Alicia
1995?
Revised May 2002
© Alicia - May 2002
I was born on September 7th
along with several brothers and sisters. I was the 3rd to arrive.
The first was a little grey and white kitten. Then came a calico, which is a
cat with black and white and orange spots. I was next. I’m black and white like
my mother, Sarah. The family I was born to, the human family that owned Sarah,
thought that I was the youngest and last kitten to be born that night, so they
went to bed because it was very late. The next morning, they discovered that
the rest of my siblings had come sometime after I was born. One was all black
except for two spots of white on her belly. Another one was a second grey and
white, and then another calico. While the rest of us were ready to eat as soon
as we could, my oldest brother, the first grey and white, lay alone in the
corner of our box. When my brother was born, he couldn’t breath right away. He
was my mother’s first baby, and Sarah didn’t quite know what to do to help him.
He seemed to be alright at first, and that reminded our family a dog named
“Lucky” in a movie. Our family didn’t believe in luck, so they named him
“Blessed”. They would have called him Charlie Blessed, but he didn’t stay with
us. I never got to know him, because he was gone by noon the next day.
In my world, it was very dark, because
I hadn’t yet opened my eyes at all. My sister, the black one with 2 white
spots, was the first to open her eyes, among the 5 of us. It was a week after
we were born. I opened mine soon after that. We were in a box in the small
closet of a big room with lots of things in it. Everyone except the remaining
grey and white kitten opened their eyes that day along with me. Our family
decided it was time to name us. The oldest calico was named Tinkerbell, because
our family had once had a calico cat named Tinkerbell, and they missed her very
much. They named me Rolly Polly, just Rolly for short. I guess they thought I
rolled around a lot. The blanket in my box was so soft! The black one was
Dominiqua, because they wanted to name her Domino if she’d been a boy. The grey
and white was Thomas, another name of a cat the family had once had. The second
calico, the one that didn’t have as many colorful spots, was another girl. They
named her Honey. So that’s the 5 of us. Oh, and my mother Serendipity. We call
her Sarah like our family, because Serendipity is a long word that means they
were happy she came to their house instead of wondering around the neighborhood
without a family of her own.
It took a while, until I was a little
bigger, before we all started wondering what was outside of our box. My sister
Tinkerbell was ready to go see for herself, so she jumped out of our box into
the one set in front of us. I was excited, and decided to follow her. There was
a whole room outside of our box! It wasn’t long then before we all started
walking around the room whenever we could. It was then that we found out about
our family’s other cat. She’s almost always somewhere else where we can’t see
her, but one time we walked out of our room and into the mother and the father
of the family’s room. It was alright that we went out of our room, because our
Mom was with us. One of the people in our family picked me up and we started
moving down the hall. I saw this big, fuzzy cat on the bed in another room. The
other cat wasn’t happy to see me, and she made really loud noises with her
mouth at me. I knew about hissing, but I’d never seen a cat make that noise
when she was really mad. Alicia, the human girl I was with, knew I was
frightened, so she took me back to my room. I didn’t see the cat much any more
after that, but I knew my mother didn’t like her.
One of the things in our regular room
was a big box with a lot of sand in it. One day, Tinkerbell, who loves to
explore, jumped in and used it to go potty. Soon, we all started using it for
that. Our mother didn’t even need to teach us, because we had figured it out
for ourselves that it was a cat box.
One day our family tried to feed us
warm milk, but it wasn’t nearly as good as what we could get from our own
mother. So they gave us some soft cat food that Tinkerbell and I liked. Soon,
Thomas ate some, and then Honey. But Dominica just didn’t like it. She just
didn’t like anything. Then one day, she ate some really hard, dry food that
crunched when she chewed it. She liked it! The rest of us, even our mother,
liked the soft food much better, but that was all Dominica would eat, so our
family let us having whichever we wanted. Now that we eat the food that most
cats eat, our mother doesn’t feed us anymore. We feel like grown-ups, but we
still want to stick close to our mother.
Each day now our family puts us out in
another, even bigger room and we find our way back to the room we call
our home. We like to play in the big room sometimes, and once we stayed a long
time out in this big room that mother calls the family’s “living room”, and
decided we kind of liked it out where the family stayed. After that, we started
coming out of the room we usually slept in by ourselves. Soon, we only went
back to our old room to eat, because we have our own cat box in the “living
room”, and we can even sleep out there, too. Sometimes the girl Alicia will
sleep with us.
Each day, we have new adventures…
One day when we were all a month old,
we were out in the “living room”.
“Hey, Rolly!” meowed Tinkerbell,
running over to me. “Let’s play.” She tried to get me to start wrestling.
I didn’t feel like wrestling just then,
so I grabbed Honey and Tinkerbell played with her instead. I went over to
Thomas. Since he and I are the only boys, we stick together.
“Hey, Rolly,” greeted Thomas. “Look at
Tinkerbell and Honey!”
I looked. The two had jumped
in the trash basket. It was funny. Then Dominica joined them. Her soft stripes
stood out in the light, even against the dark fur. Just then, Tinkerbell
climbed out. She grabbed hold of a nearby chair with her claws and climbed up
the back of the upholstery. From there she jumped on the desk.
“Hey!” I cried and joined the others in
following her up the chair to the desk. Our family came in and a big light
flashed and caught us by surprise. Sometimes our family liked to take pictures
of us, our mother had said.
After the 5 of us had explored the
desktop, we slowly climbed our jumped down. I went over to play with a little
plastic box that swung around on a string. It hung on the curtains over the
window. I liked batting at it. Dominica watched me and Tinkerbell kept saying
she wanted a turn with it, so I ended up wrestling with her after all. We get
tired of our games easily, so soon we were looking for a nice spot to take a
nap. We all fit under a big rocking chair, but our family pulled us out because
they didn’t think we were safe under there. I wanted to be under a chair,
anyway. So I slipped under the couch. One by one the others followed. We slept
for awhile under there. When I woke up, Thomas was gone. I crept out into the
room. I was still a little sleepy, so I just sat down between two cushions on
the floor by the sofa and watched for Tinkerbell and Dominica, or Domi, to wake
up. When they crawled out from under the sofa, they were ready to wrestle. The
mother of the family came up and found us like that and started singing to me:
“Rolly,
Polly, puddin’ in pot
“kissed
the girls and couldn’t stop!
“kissed
them all until they cried,
“and
then Rolly Polly said ‘goodbye!’”
All the girls laughed and Thomas teased
me, but then the mother started singing to them, and they had to be quiet.
Later that night I was walking by a big
thing Mom calls a TV. All the sudden, BOOM! Noise and picture came out of it.
It was loud, but by now my brothers and sisters and I were used to it. The
family sometimes sat in the “living room” and watched this thing called a TV.
They liked us to sit on their laps while they were on the couch, but usually we
wanted to spend the time playing instead.
One day our family seemed very excited.
Mother said they were leaving. “Moving,” she said –but that we would go, too.
We were all put into a box-like thing along with mother. We all got squashed.
We had to stay in a strange little room called the “bathroom” for a long time.
There was water and food and a cat box, all squeezed into the little room with
us. The family let us go out at night, but then we had to go right back into
the little room the next day until finally the family put us in the little
carrier again and took us to a big empty house, where we were allowed to play
for most of the day before we were put into the new house’s bathroom. The new
bathroom looked exactly like the old one, so we weren’t too frightened. We
could hear strangers in the house, so we didn’t mind staying in the bathroom
where it was safe. But then we had to go into the dark, cold garage for awhile.
We didn’t like that much, but we tried to get used to it. When we finally came
back into the new house, all of our furniture was back! We were so happy to
smell all the familiar smells again. We got to explore all over again! But soon
we learned where everything was at, and realized that the boxes sitting
everywhere were much more fun than the old furniture. Honey got stuck in a box
once, but Alicia came and took her out.
One night we were all in the garage.
The family put us there so the other cat could look around the new house. Our
mother made a big mess –well, we helped a little, but we thought it was alright
since our mom was doing it!- and the mother of our family was very angry about
it. She said we might have to go away! I don’t want to go away. My mother
doesn’t think we will. But now we’re all frightened that we might.
Quite some time later, after we were
feeling quite at home at the new house, our family went away on a trip. We were
shut out into the garage and a lady we don’t know came every day to give us
food. She never let us into the house, but it would have been alright being in
the garage for a while except that the family took Tinkerbell away with them!
When they finally came back, Tinkerbell didn’t come back with them. I found out
later that Tinkerbell had stayed with her new kitten friend, Lili. Lili lived
with the family’s other daughter somewhere far away.
It wasn’t very long after that that two
ladies and a little girl came to visit. They held and petted us all for awhile,
but when they left, they took Honey with them. We never saw her again. I tried
not to mind too much; after all, Honey was always whining about something and
she was too small to be much fun. The only thing that worried me was whether
someday someone would come and take me away, too! I don’t think our family had
decided who got to stay with them yet, but I knew that Alicia was very sad to
see my sisters go. I spent a lot of time with Alicia to make up for it. I knew
that Thomas really loved the mother of the family, and that Domi (that’s short
for Dominica) was happier now that she was the only girl kitten. She used to be
quite shy, but now she likes to spend more time with our family. She and Sarah
even play together a lot now.
Even though we were all very happy that
way, a few weeks later, one of the strange men that I remembered from when we
changed houses came back. He had seen Dominica when the family moved, and he
wanted to take her back to his little girl. We were all very sad when Domi was
gone, but we didn’t think any more of us would have to leave. We thought that
we would be able to stay together now.
Our mother, Sarah, didn’t like our
family’s other cat Oreo. Our family thought that she was just very protective
of us, her kittens, but we were much older when one day Mother made a bad mess
when she attacked the other cat. Thomas and I were frightened, and Alicia tried
to comfort us while the rest of the family was very upset. I think our mother
might have hurt Oreo, and Thomas saw the whole thing because he was playing
nearby when it happened. After that, they had to keep Mom away from Oreo so she
was usually in the garage. Mom didn’t like that much, and she didn’t think it
was fair. One day after that, Thomas and I woke up from napping and discovered
Sarah was gone. We were very sad and confused, but we knew we still had a
family and we were happy with them. We still have new adventures every day.
Another day, we were sitting in a chair
and all of the sudden, Alicia grabbed us. She took us to the room where the
family eats and the dad of the family picked up Thomas and put stuff in his
ears. Thomas cried and yelled and Alicia explained it was for bugs in our ears.
So I told Thomas what she had said before I got the liquid in my ears. In a few
days, our ears didn’t bother us at all anymore.
We knew Oreo still didn’t like us, so
we left her pretty much alone, except when we wanted to sleep in Alicia’s room.
Oreo spent most of her time in Alicia’s room, but we liked to be in there
anyway. Quite some time after all of these events, Thomas and I were in
Alicia’s room settling in for a nap when Alicia picked us up and took us to the
room that has always fascinated me. It’s called the bathroom. I never
understood what any of the things in it were for until then.
At first I didn’t know what was
happening, because Alicia picked up Thomas first. I just sat in the corner and
wondered why Thomas was crying. When Alicia set Thomas back down by me, he was
all wet! I helped lick him dry as she used a warm, soft towel to rub him. Then
she picked me up. Alicia was very gentle, of course, so it wasn’t so bad. She
lowered me into the water in the tub, and used a wet washrag to shampoo and
rinse me, telling me I would be soft and clean when she was done.
I didn’t mind my bath as much as
Thomas, because she held her hand under me to keep me steady, and I’ve always
trusted Alicia. She has always protected me from the big noise the machine
called a vacuum makes, and she keeps me away from Oreo. But once when she let
go to get a little shampoo, I was frightened. Her hand was back in a moment and
she used the washrag to rub me. Soon I was done, and the mother of the family
came in to help dry us. I heard them saying they were afraid we’d get too cold
because we were so wet, and I wondered about that, too, because I’d never been
so wet before. Alicia and Mom took us to the parents’ bedroom and set us in a
laundry basket with lots of warm blankets and a shirt. The basket was right in
front of a heater that blew warm air into the blankets to warm us up. When we were
completely dry, I realized Alicia was right, we were quite soft, and we
smelled good, too. Thomas and I got really sleepy from being so warm and
content, so we slept there the rest of the day. Our family had closed the door
so that no one would bother us.
When I say ‘no one’, I mean the
family’s two little boys. Sometimes they like to play games with us that we
don’t like, which means Alicia and Mom and Dad have to rescue us. Even though
they can be naughty, we know they are a part of our family, and we love our
family. When we’re with our family, it’s like we’re always in the warm basket
of towels being warmed by the special heater that’s just for us.
This is where I end my story. We live a
happy life here, just Oreo, my brother Thomas, me, and our family. We have a
good home and we’re very good masters.
Goodbye!
…Rolly
will return…