
Celebrating Our First Three Years with Merlin the Orange Tabby
July 7, 2014Merlin and his brother Indiana Jones were unceremoniously dumped in a parking lot in downtown Los Angeles sometime around the beginning of June 2011. They were only a week old. What kind of horrible person would do this is beyond me. A nice lady found them and gave them to my friend Dawn Vargas, owner of Fur Baby Rescue for dogs and cats.
When Merlin was 5 weeks old on July 7, 2011, I stumbled into her rescue. There was an entire room full of kittens to choose from. I really wanted a Siamese cat, but the two Dawn had available for adoption were very skiddish. This was a problem as Steve and I wanted a kitten that we could train to ride on our shoulders and go outside like our previous cat Harley. The other cats in the room were either working on clawing my backpack or fighting over a can of cat food. Only one little orange kitten with white socks and baby blue eyes was interested in me. Dawn was kind enough to give him to me for free.
My boyfriend Steve was supposed to be at work already. I needed him to be gone as I was smuggling Merlin into the apartment we had at that time in downtown Los Angeles. We were allowed to have pets. That was not the problem. The problem was that Steve wanted me to wait a month before we got another cat as Harley had recently passed away on the 4th of July of pancreatic cancer. I really did want to honor Steve’s wishes, but this little kitten chose me and that was that. As I walked into the room with the cardboard cat carrier, Steve stopped dead in his tracks and exclaimed, “What is that?” I smiled tentatively before replying, “Our new cat Merlin.” Steve didn’t say another word and left for work. By the next day, Merlin was his new best friend.
Today is Merlin’s 3 year anniversary that he’s lived with us. Little did I know 3 years ago that we would get that other kitten a month after Harley passed away and it would look almost identical to her and that by the following spring, I would also have that blue eyed Siamese cat I wanted. But then again, both of those cats came to us as well and that is another story for another day.
In the meantime, please check out all all our nice media presentations online. To start, we have a nice photo album of Merlin on Flickr. You can see him live as a kitten eating cantaloupe on our Phoenix Genesis YouTube Channel. If you want to see more photos of all our animals and read about their antics, please hit that like button on our Facebook HarleyTheCat page. Enjoy.
– Des Manttari, Editor-in-Chief, Phoenix Genesis
Feel free to link or print this: just include the PHOENIX GENESIS URL: https://www.phoenixgenesis.com/
copyright (c) 2014 – All rights reserved.