Meet Max.Pat Caldwell
While Kevin is undergoing treatment, we’ve invited lots of exciting guest writers to stop by in his honor. But there’s no reason the hospitality can’t extend to another species, is there?
This week’s Mother Jones affiliated cat is Max, who joined reporter Patrick Caldwell last summer as the fifth (and only feline) resident of his Washington, DC row house. Here’s a shot of Max exploring the dark corners of his realm.
Max’s background is almost as shrouded and mysterious as that crawl space. How old is he? No one knows. How many people have cared for him before Pat and his roommates? No one’s quite sure about that either.
As the story goes, Max has been bequeathed from shared home to shared home like a well-loved futon as his keepers have, one after the other, moved out of the beltway. And while that might make him sound like a very mobile cat, Pat reports he’s quite sedentary in most respects. His favorite form of play—swatting at things just above his head—can and usually is performed while reclining on his back. This Thanksgiving, he gave the humans a brief scare by slipping away while they were out celebrating. But true to his nature, when they came home Max seemed to have whiled away the hours just a few yards from the window they’d mistakenly left open.
Unlike Hilbert and Hopper, Max can’t count on Southern California’s sun to keep him warm, so over the winter his roommates cleverly rigged up a cat bed right above a radiator. Ready for a nap?
With the roommate most responsible for Max heading to Kansas City for medical school come fall, this peripatetic puss’s future is a bit unsettled. Will he stay with his current community, or will he head west? If he stays, what if the new roommate is allergic, or—as hard as this may be to imagine—not a cat person? Yes, there may be yet another loving home in his future.
Whatever happens, there’s no doubt Max will land on his feet. Cats always do.
