As a one-time Sunday treat, here is a dialogue with Hili’s predecessor: Pia. Pia lived to the ripe old age of 14, and died in April of last year with but one tooth left in her head (but she was still able to nom birds and crunchies). She was much more philosophical than Hili is now. I have a lot of Pia dialogues, but they won’t be displayed, as we’re busy with Hili.
The dialogues started when Racjonalista asked me for permission to translate several of my posts into Polish. I said that was fine, but knowing that its proprietors, Andrzej and Malgorzata, had a cat, I asked for a “fee” of two cat pictures per article. Those pictures turned into dialogues with Pia, and, when she died, with Kitten Hili, who is now a feisty teenager.
You can see her obituary, a dialogue, and some photos here.
Pia often expatiated on philosophy, and squabbled with Andrzej, but, as you see below, she was a cat, and that means she was deeply concerned with noms:
Pia: Your dinner is in the Cat, meaning me.
A: All of it?
Pia: No, just the piece of meat you cut off before going to answer the phone.
14 is a relatively young age for a female cat to die. I had a lovely old female cat who at 19 still produced litters of kittens, had all her teeth, and was killed by a German Sheperd dog who trespassed onto my property. She could have lived well into her twenties like her sisters.
Interesting factoid:
Pia meaning and name origin
Pia \pia\ as a girl’s name is pronounced PEE-ah. It is of Latin origin, and the meaning of Pia is “pious, reverent”.
Read more at http://www.thinkbabynames.com/meaning/0/Pia#9ecd6yrBJs1Auzed.99
Pia is a popular Swedish name and our Pia-cat was named after a very mischevious Swedish girl we knew. Neither of us had any idea about the Latin origin of this name! Pia-cat had never shown any signs of piety, thank the Benevolent Teapot.
Of course she didn’t! A name doesn’t condition its bearer to integrate and display its meaning, thank goodness! My name is Vera – Wiera in Polish so I’m sure you know its meaning – and I couldn’t be further from my name’s meaning!
Do tell more please. I looked up ‘Wiera’ and the wise oracle said ‘contained’…. (now if I think of ‘Weira’ instead, I might be inclined to think of ‘weird’, but that can’t be so.) 🙂
Wiera (wiara in Polish) means “faith”.
Yep. I was baptized in London by a Polish Orthodox Archbishop in 1947, and on my Baptism Certificate, my first name is written as Wiera, and my last name was likewise given a Polish spelling quite different from the spelling used in English which itself is a phonetic transliteration from Russian.
Oh, I’m plenty weird alright, and proud of it!
😀 Good for you, fellow weirdo!
(Google translated ‘Wiara’ correctly, i.e. ‘faith’, but says wiera is ‘contains’. Thanks.)
I just checked Google Translate – it translated Wiera (with a capital W) in Polish to “Vera” in English. Without the capital W but with a lower case w it did translate into “contains” in English. Upper and lower case make all the difference.
Happy to learn of our fellowship! 😀
Wiara (with both upper and lower case W) translates into faith:
wiara-noun
faith
wiara, wyznanie, wierność, ufność, słowność
religion
religia, wiara, wyznanie wiary
belief
przekonanie, wiara, wierzenie, zaufanie, uwierzenie
confidence
pewność siebie, zaufanie, ufność, wiara, przeświadczenie, dowierzanie
trust
zaufanie, trust, ufność, wiara, powiernictwo, depozyt
creed
kredo, wyznanie wiary, wiara
credence
wiara, doktryna
troth
wiara
fidelity
wierność, dokładność, wiara
delightful, though 14 seems rather young. I wish Hili a longer but just as happy a life (& am grateful my little fat fluffy Plushie is not in the habit of the transmogrofication of Keira-noms into Plushie-noms)
What a beautiful face Pia has!
It’s such a shame that so many cats’s kidneys give out before they’ve lived the full measure of their lives. I really hope we humans figure out ways to change that.
b&
I think that is down to the food we give them. Dry food used to be the culprit, as are many brands of wet food, but there now is dry food available that does not have that effect on cats’ kidneys. Wild cats and feral cats don’t have this problem – this is due to their feeding on fresh preys such as birds, mice and the like. Now, it is largely impossible to feed one’s cats like that unless one breeds mice for that purpose… but perhaps uncooked poultry meat and fresh-water fish might help.
I must add that when I was living in the country and my cats lived outside 24/7 all year, even though I fed them industrial cat food, none of them ever developed kidney failure. I reckon that was due to the fact that they also hunted and fed on birds and field mice. Also, their fur was always beautiful and shiny, and they had plenty of direct sunlight, thus had a normal steady source of natural Vitamin D from licking their fur. On the other hand, I lost two beloved old males to kidney failure when living in an apartment.
Kibble is definitely quite problematic, even the “high-quality” kind. It’s missing the single most important macronutrient in a cat’s diet: water. Being desert-adapted predators, cats get most of their water from their prey, and have weak thirst instincts. No cat on a kibble diet is going to separately drink enough water.
Baihu gets (commercially-prepared frozen) raw food, mostly from Nature’s Variety and Stewart. And he gets lots of water mixed in with the food — enough to the point that it’s soupy, and as much as I can add in that he’ll still eat.
There’s lots of good information here, including recipes for making your own cat food:
http://www.catinfo.org/
Cheers,
b&
Never heard of Kibbles… My present darling cat gets both dry and wet foods as well as fresh water. She has always preferred the dry food and has always drunk the fresh water I provide for her every day, but she does like the wet food too. My old males who developed kidney failure didn’t like the dry food, and they also developed dental plaque early on which resulted in their losing their teeth. My present moggie who is now eight years old shows no sign of dental plaque and is in great health.
Some cat breeds are more prone to kidney failure than others, too, or so I was told.
I’m told that the feral cats around here don’t live too long, generally because of kidney problems from the lack of water in the winter months. So I keep a small tub of water with an ice-melter out all winter long for the critters.
How touching. Each morning, I never know what I’m gonna get, when I open up my mail. 😀 Chocolates?! I’ve been moved to tears of joy and tears of sorrow.
The best gift of all is feeling like I’m getting to know not only Hili but Andrzej and Malgorzata and their kindness and grace in the world. Their obituary for Pia has rent my heart again, and put into words what I simply couldn’t, and then didn’t want, to express – the raw feelings of a similar loss this past summer.
Thanks to them and to Dr. C for sharing these scintillating facets of their lives.
What a beautiful tabby and a moving obituary. Pia definitely had a different personality than Hili. No doubt Hili will grow in wisdom and insight too.
Anderzej’s monologue captures the experience of losing a beloved pet very well and very movingly.