When he was a kitten he used to walk up the hall from Nan's to Mum's apartment wearing a new crocheted poncho every day.  He liked yarn!

When he was ten he received his first collar with a medal stating his name and phone number.  It was rather heavy and he had to get used to walking down the stairs with it.  It was very entertaining.

He was afraid of thunder and loved chicken livers.  He liked to roll in sunny spots of the yard and chase butterflies.  He had this amazing shade of orange nose that we used to call "Football nose".  When Pookie came to live with us Tony learned to handle thunder but never gave up the chicken livers.  He even showed Pookie how to enjoy a properly cooked liver.

Pookie and Tony were close buddies, even though Pookie once spit brown kibbles at Tony, in play of course.  Pookie didn't like the brown kibbles.  Pookie liked Tony's food and would always leave just a bit for him in the bowl.

One time when Pookie was first here, Mum leaned over to pet Tony.  Tony, ever the lover not the fighter type, slapped Mum's hand a few times for scaring him.

Before Pookie though, Tony had another brother -- Jamie.  Tony and Jamie would play fight through the neighbor's fence and would tour the neighborhood together.  One Summer day Tony was smelling our neighbors Marianne and Tony's flowers and Jamie thought he'd pay a visit to the pets of the people next to our neighbors.  Jamie loved dogs.  The neighbor's pets happened to be dogs.  Very large dogs.

Tony loved flowers.  Tony was totally engrossed in the flowers when the dogs said a very loud hello to Jamie.  Did you know cats can fly straight up into the air?  I wish I had film of it -- it was like feline slapstick.  Jamie flew backwards about ten feet while Tony travelled up from the flowers and within three seconds they were both back in their own yard.

That didn't stop them from travelling though, they enjoyed that without trouble for the rest of their lives.  Tony never really wanted to go out though.  I had to drag him from the house when we decided it was such a nice day the cats should come and join us.  Tookie and Jamie would do anything so they had a ball.  Tony clung to the screen door for the rest of the day.  After that, they all stayed out well into the nights.

Tony was a hunter however, and he liked to hunt our hamster, Puffy (this was before the name Puffy was chic -- I wanted to call her some godawful thing like Tweezle Dee).  Tony saw Puffy as a very noisy rodent, and he wanted to play with her.  Without fail, every day of Puffy's three years with us (she later ate part of her Habitrail sleeping cube and died one day in May of 1983), we would be sitting around and hear the crash of her Habitrail.  We'd go to see what it was and surprise surprise, there was Tony, sitting next to it, trying to get the lid off.  We duct taped it down for this exact reason.

When we first moved to the house Tony suceeded in freeing Puffy and Nan and I spent the majority of a day trying to bribe her out from under the cabinet in the corner.  Tony was very helpful - he reached under the cabinet a few times to see if he could find her.  Miraculously, she did come out and that's when the duct tape went on.

Tony had a few adventures under the sub-floor of the kitchen too.  There's a closet under the stairs that had a crawlspace to access wires and plumbing to the kitchen.  The cats all loved to open the closet and climb in.  Jamie went surfing on some game boxes that decided they were fed up with the closet and wanted to spread out... all over the stairs.  Tookie just used to like to sleep on the shelf.
Tony heard something one day.  We heard something after a while too.  Tony meowing from under the dining table.  Way under the dining room table.  Under the floor.  The crawlspace was too small for any human to get into which makes me believe it was just shortage of wallboard and not access to anything that resulted in that hole.

The chicken livers saved the day.  They may have stunk cooking (I personally didn't and still don't share Tony's affection for them) but one thing's for sure -- you can smell 'em through the floor.  He found his way out for them, and had a nice snack while we dusted him off.  He later had another adventure over the refrigerator and behind the wall with a similar conclusion.

Tony's first encounter with a bath came after his first encounter with Carver Tripp American Walnut stain.  We were working on the house, as always.  Maybe he wanted to be like Tookie when she laid down in the peach paint, who knows.  He had tried to stand on the can.  There was nothing covering the can but foil.  Stupid on our part, yes.

I found these little pussycat prints all over the floor in the living room.  The rug, thankfully, wasn't down yet.  Not that we would have minded because it was a dark brown rug so it would've matched. :)

We couldn't find Tony for a while, the prints went around in circles.  Then we found him and washed his feet.  He didn't like that.  He really did not like that.

That brings to mind another interesting thing I used to do to him... He was a neat freak.  He had these pure white paws and he would always take his nightly bath under the end table near me.  When he was done, he'd walk by and I'd ruffle his fur.  He didn't like that either...  not after his bath.

Tony climbed the mulberry tree once.  Got stuck up there too.  He eventually came down with the assistance of a ladder and...don't get mad...a broom.  Don't worry, he was very well cared for and loved, the broom was used only to prevent him from going any higher.

In his later years Tony liked to hang out on the porch.  He got kind of famous as being "the cat that sits on the porch and runs over to his mommy for kisses".  Well, he was.  He slept on the porch and when Nan would be near the porch, he'd come over to the edge for kisses.  He liked kisses.  If you were to go over to him and ask for a kiss, he'd nudge you with his head until you gave him one.

He also liked to curl up in Mum's lap, after settling for about and hour.  He'd march, and march... and march.

In August of 1986, there was this really bad thunderstorm.  If you're reading this carefully and you have a better memory than me, you'll know he didn't much care for thunder.  He really didn't like rain.  He used to put his ears back and crawl everytime there was a puff of wind, so for him to be out in a thunderstorm was not cool.

We looked for him for a few hours before we spotted him under the neighbor's back porch.  We took him home and dried him off and the next day, our neighbor, Marianne, was talking to Mum about what had happened, because she heard us yelling "Tony!" up and down the street.  Her brother, that lived with her, was named Tony.  They were obviously shaken by people screaming "Tony" up and down the street late at night and Marianne suggested maybe we should name our Tony something like Fido.  We called him Fido but he didn't particularly care for it. :)

Tony left us on March 15, 1988.  He joined Tookie and Jamie, Puffy and the birds and fish.  That day is too clear in my mind and I don't really want to talk about his death.  It was his life that was great and now you, reading this, will maybe remember him too and chuckle about the flowers and "Fido".

I knew I wanted to do this for him though, today.  It's been ten years since I saw him behind the couch, or on the porch, or sitting on the counter waiting for the chicken livers to be cooked.  His picture is still up on the wall next to me, and I still have his collar.  More than that, I knew him, and I'm grateful for that.