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"A Journey Of Love"
As a child I lived in Tampa, Florida. We kids grew up hard and didn't have a lot of extras like some of the kids we played with in the old State Street Housing Project.
My brothers and I would walk along State Street, collect all the empty pop bottles we could find and return them to the local grocery for the three cents bottle deposit. On a good day we could find up to thirty cents worth of bottles. I know, that doesn't sound like much money to the kids today but, believe me, it was a lot of money for a kid in those days. You could buy a loaf of bread for twenty cents, a bottle of Coca-Cola for a nickel. Yes, it was a lot of money to me.
We would divide the money up at the grocery and each one of us would scatter through the store in different directions to the candy counter of his choice...usually.
For weeks I saved my pennies to buy, what I thought at the time was, the most beautiful, trained, pedigree feline of the century. I have to chuckle at the experience now when I think of that old skinny cat and how I really got stung out of my seventy five cents. Odds are the old cat didn't even belong to the kid who sold her to me but that's neither here no there to the story.
Though Mom protested the day I brought her home, she finally said I could keep her after a few provisions were agreed upon. One, she had to eat only table scraps and two I, alone, would have to see to her everyday needs.
I was heart broken to learn weeks later we were moving forty miles inland and couldn't take Minnie with us because my dad didn't like cats and didn't want her at the new place we were moving to. We left Minnie with a neighbor and made the move to the country but I was devastated.
It must have been more than a month later, as my brothers and I were playing in our new yard, we witnessed something unbelievable.
There, a few hundred yards away, came Minnie and she was ragged looking, even skinnier than we remembered her. She recognized us immediately and came running as fast as her tired old legs would carry her. She was at our feet rubbing up against and in and out of our legs, purring loudly and mewing repeatedly.
I couldn't help myself, I kept screaming her name over and over.
"Minnie! Minnie!" I wailed so loudly my dad heard me from the house.
"Well...I don't believe it...I just don't believe it!" Dad said in disbelief as he walked out to where we were.
"I'll tell you what...if that old skinny cat missed you kids so much she would walk all the way here to find you...well, she can stay."
With those words my dad turned and retreated to the house. The old cat lived to the ripe old age of twelve years then died, peacefully, in her sleep.
My dad still doesn't like cats but he had a lot of respect for an old puss we kids used to call Skinny Minnie.
