05:26 PM October 25, 2006 | Comments (0)
Regarding Henry
Well as I mentioned both Emma and I missed Tyler after he was put to sleep. I love Emma dearly and she's the sweetest little thing but she's no lap cat like Tyler was and I missed that. She missed having another cat around to bother. So Dad and I went off to the Hinsdale Humane Society one Sunday in early June. I was kind of hoping for a kitten but I was open to adopting an adult cat, too.
Sure kittens are cute and cuddly and sweet to look at but there's something even more rewarding about giving a home to an adult cat since they are harder to place. Well, I wanted to take about 5 of them home but I had to pick one. Yes, they had a cute kitten but there was this buff colored male tabby that just spoke to me. His name was Sunny and they brought him to a room for us to play with him and get to know him. He was very curious about his surroundings and kept coming over to be pet. He purred instantly and I was sold.
He's 5 1/2 years old and I was told that I probably wouldn't be able to change his name unless it was close to Sunny. I have a thing about pet names and Sunny, while not the cutesy gag me type name I abhor, still wasn't what I wanted.
My pet names usually have an historical or literary reference and are people names. Tyler got his name because for some reason when I looked at him as a kitten, the old political slogan for US President John Tyler popped in my head, “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too!” From that moment on he was Tyler, despite me not having an affinity for 19th Century US history or politics – LOL. Emma was named for my second favorite book by one of my favorite authors – Emma by Jane Austen. (My friend Cait's son, Josh, asked me once why I didn't name Emma after my favorite Jane Austen novel. – I answered that I didn't really think I'd want to call “Here Sense & Sensibilty! Here Sense & Sensibility!”)
For years I had wanted a cat named Horatio because I love Shakespeare and I love the Horatio Hornblower books and movies. Well, there were two problems with that.
- Horatio sounded nothing like Sunny
- He just didn't look like a Horatio
So I settled on Henry. It sounded similar to Sunny so his ears perked up right away. It wasn't cutesy. There was not only a Henry in a Jane Austen book, but also several Henry's in history (my choice Henry V, not Henry VIII). So Sunny became Henry.
Henry has settled in very nicely over the past several months. He's very sweet, loves to use me as a couch when watching TV, greets me at the door when I get home, and he and Emma get along pretty well – they have their moments but for the most part are quite friendly to each other.
Coming soon, hopefully, a picture of Henry
