Our Cats (engl.)

These are some images of the cats of the Becker and Lamertz family.

My Mother’s Cats

When I was a really small kid, we got ourself a cat from a farm where we spent our holidays. With my limited experience of a 4 year old, we called her pussy. As far as I remember her, she was a triple-coloured ordinary housecat.

Some two years later, playing in the park right around the corner, I found a kitten that I took home with me, and after some discussions, Möhrchen was the new member of our family. I guess her name translates best to blacky because she was all black exept for a single white spot right on her throat.

I’m pretty sure there have to be some old photographs of the two somewhere in a box at my mother’s flat, but I still haven’t found them…yet.

I was pretty young, so I actually don’t know anymore what happened to them. But story goes that both ran away and we were catless for many years.

Shortly after my parents divorced, when I was just about 17 or so, my mother got us two young kittens which desperately needed a home. We discussed about names for a while and settled with Fred and Helena in reference to the Luc Besson movie Subway, but soon we knew better, and Fred became Denise %-)

Then Hasan, my mother’s mate by that time, got himself Boncuk - which means something like little glass ball - from a family whose father got Asthma, but he couldn’t get along with a lonly cat in his flat, so Boncuk became our new family member.

Hasan went away, Boncuk stayed, and Bear arrived.

Bear was a left-alone kitten in the backyard of my mother’s job. He couldn’t have been older than about 6 weeks or so. Hungry, and completely without any respect, he soon had found his place in the family and has become a big boy.

With now 4 cats in the house, Denise become more and more nervous, because the other three started to terrorize her. She was such a heartbreaker, but she couldn’t stand the permanent strain and startet to become thinner and thinner.

I had moved out a while ago, but my flat was by far too small to take her with me, so we decided to give her to a colleague of my mother who already had an older cat for whom she wanted a mate when she was at work. Giving her to a new mommy was terribly painful for us, but since then, Denise has become a healthy, beautiful and selfsure(?) cat, and in retrospective I’m pretty sure it was the best thing for her.

Boncuk and Baerchen Three years ago, Helena became sick, and after some short struggle, she left us, and so there are only Boncuk and Bear left with my mother. In the beginning, they didn’t get along very well, but now they get along.

Boncuk had an operation some weeks ago, but is gaining weight again now.

Kerstin’s and My Cats

Kerstin was always hooked on cats, but she’s also allergic to a lot of stuff that’s flying around, so we always implicitely assumed she was allergic against cats too. But not so! Buy that time, she had a colleague that also hat some kind of animal house, and so Kerstin met Maus.

Maus was a divorce-victim, and had been handed from relative to relative before we got her. She was a frightened cat that almost lost all trust in humans, and especially disliked everybody larger than 5 feet.

After a while though, she got used to me - Don’t trust the stories, that cats always go near the persons that don’t like them. I love cats and they love me! - and since Kerstin and I live together, I can pretty sure say that Maus is my sweetheart. Btw. do you know of any other cat that loves to sit on naked legs?

But it took us quite some time to actually move together, so looking for a mate for Maus, we got to the local animal shelter (sorry, lack of dictionary %-) where Kerstin saw Pucky. This was love at first sight - due to the fact that Kerstin seems to have some kind of weird preference to large, slightly overweighted guys

Pucky is one hell of a cat, about 22 pounds with a shoulder height of, hmmm, 15-17 inch. He is well fed, but not fat, and demands love in large amounts - and don’t you dare to ignore his demand!

While Maus is more the hunter-style cat, pucky is the classical milk-slobbing version. He loves milk in about every form available, from chese over cacoa and caffee au’lait to Haägen Dasz