Ruthie's Doppleganger

For some reason -- boredom I think, hopefully not vanity -- I happened to do a Google images search on my name this afternoon. Just a few random images came up, like a photo or two from my other web page and some assorted shots I've taken for articles I wrote or my other weblog. And then I came across something more surprising: a photo of a cat that looked eerily like our cat, Ruthie. The cat's name was...."Libby" , and she's available for adoption at a shelter in Wisconsin.

Valarie didn't think the two cats looked all that much alike, or that the coincidence of a cat named Libby that looked like Ruthie. But I'm pretty amazed.

My family has experienced bizarre phenomena with our cats before. When I was a kid, we had this really chubby cat named Charlie -- who, by the way, was a tabby like Ruthie, and both of them came from the same McMinnville neighborhood (across town from our house) as strays. One night my dad picked up me and a friend Joe Czekalski at the city pool with the news that "Charlie got run over". My mom had backed the car out of the garage, heard a cat cry in terror, and slammed on the breaks. When she got out there was a bunch of black and grey fir that looked exactly like Charlie's.

After I got home we went through the neighborhood looking for our cat. We would hear crying in the distance and even caught a brief, blurry glance. But in the end we gave up, and for days there was no sign of Charlie.

A few nights later, though, through some combination of events my parents and I each have slightly different memories of, my mom found Charlie at our doorstep, completely uninjured, waiting to be let in. We never did figure out what happened.

There was another night when, according to his description, my dad had just put Charlie out for the night when, a couple minutes later, the doorbell rang. When he answered it, no one was there except Charlie, standing right in front of the door.

The overwhelming likelihood, of course, is that all of this has a logical explanation that got skewed becuase of misunderstanding or faulty memory. But Charlie always seemed to have a subtle but unmistakable supernatural quality. I like to pretend that Ruthie is some long lost descendent, so maybe it's only appropriate that there's a little mystery to her.

Oh, and I now confess to being a candidate for the Dorks Hall of Fame after writing a weblog post about my cat.

Comments

[Ned]

"Czekalski"...Damn, I've been wondering how Joe's last name was spelled for the longest time.