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WellRed
BY WEB EDITOR KARSEN PRICE
Gibbs The Cat Comes Home
The cat was in a cage. The cage was right in front of Neiman Marcus. (Go figure.) And the cat in the cage threw me an eye-smile as I walked up to him; threw it and held it — a crinkled, eye-squint smile, full of feeling.
One smile. That was all it took.
I didn’t call home and ask, “Oh, can I?” (Those days are long gone, trust me.) I didn’t consider my shrinking checking account. The cat smiled at me in front of Neiman Marcus; I approached the Humane Society volunteer, paid thirty bucks, and took Gibbs the cat home.
He was too big and beautiful to pass by, with white paws like hands, and an interesting swirling pattern on his smoky-gray fur. I am a sucker for a lost cause, and I knew from experience that an adult kitty is less likely to get adopted than his three-month-old counterparts.
It also helped that he shared the name and a striking similarity to Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs (also known as Mark Harmon), from one of my family’s favorite TV shows, NCIS — right down to the startling blue eyes. With a name like Gibbs, I knew I could take the cat home without my husband filing for immediate divorce. The name would give us both — me, and the gunney, I mean, cat — a chance to make our case.
That morning a few short months ago, strolling around SouthPark with my mother, I realized the time had come to get another cat. This cat.
You see, I was still recovering from the loss of his predecessor, Munchie — the biggest, most beautiful orange cat you have ever seen, with a white mustache and mournful meow and a penchant for ham that bordered on addiction. Munchie (I liked to call him my Golden Retriever, he was so big) died in the winter of 2008, at 14 years old, right in front of my eyes, of an apparent heart attack. One minute he was meowing at the back door; the next minute my boy was gone, leaving me no time to prepare for the loss.
I loved Munchie so much that I knew the next cat in the family was going to have some big shoes to fill. In fact, no cat will ever replace Munchie — a cat that my two stepsons found at elementary school and snuck into the house while I was at work, because they didn’t “want anybody else to get him.” Munchie was the kind of cat that everyone loved; the kind of cat that drooled when he was happy; the kind of cat that broke into my sister’s Christmas party and made himself at home on the couch. In fact, one time, a man I didn’t know offered to buy Munchie for a thousand (albeit, drunken) dollars — and I don’t know what’s more shocking; that someone would make such an offer, or the fact that I refused.
 But when I saw Gibbs in the cage, it was like something inside me said, “This one; this one needs a home.” In life, we don’t always listen to that little voice. But this time I did, no questions asked.
And then, silence. Remarkably, Gibbs the cat didn’t meow once all the way home. No caterwauling, no hissing. Not a peep. He was as silent as Special Agent Gibbs’ character, it turns out. But that’s where the similarities ended. Because Harmon’s character, though quiet to the point of rudeness, is the Navy’s equivalent of Rambo, capable of walking through a shower of bullets without flinching. He is to bravery what Gibbs the cat, it turns out, is to chickenry.
How chicken? Gibbs the cat lived for four days under my dining room table. He didn’t even know the house had an upstairs until I took him under my arm and carried him up there.
Three short months later, Gibbs has become the favorite cat of the house. With his blue eyes (from the Siamese side of his family) and funky fur and silly cowardliness, Gibbs has carved out his own special niche in the household. He even has enough energy to keep up with my 6-year-old daughter — no small feat. He carries his string around in his mouth and stalks her each morning, meowing politely (yes, he finally found his voice) until she wakes up.
He is also the perfect athletic complement to our family, capable of jumping so high that I want to create a YouTube video of him to add to the thousands of other “priceless” moments found on the Internet. And though he is still and will always be too chicken to live outside with his two cat “brothers,” T.J. and Jovi, like I’d initially planned, even that has turned into a good thing. I found that I had missed the camaraderie of an indoor pet — you can’t hug a guppy, now can you? Missed everything, that is, except for the clumps of fur wafting along the stairwell, and that annoying 4 a.m. wakeup call I get each morning by Gibbs the cat …
And even that isn’t so bad, in truth. Gibbs hovers over my head on the pillow and smiles at me, and I remember the first time I saw him in a cage, and my sleepy heart melts. I carry him, bleary-eyed, down the stairs, and lock him in the bathroom with his food bowl every morning so I can grab a few extra hours of shut-eye. Proving only that he is already a master at training the humans in his life.
For information on adopting a pet from the Humane Society of Charlotte, visit humanesocietyofcharlotte.org.
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