Wednesday, October 14, 2009

A Rose by Any Other Name...Would Still be Gray

Have you looked at my profile picture?  Doesn't look like a rose, does it?  Doesn't look like me either.  You're probably thinking it looks like a cat.  Bingo!  That's my Rosebud, aka "Rosie", aka "the Rose".  He is my 12 year old little boy.  Thinks he's a human, he does.  Twelve years ago this month we went to the Humane Society in search of a cat or kitten.  We had recently lost our 15 year old to old age/kidney failure.  He had been FIV positive for a number of years, but lived a happy life anyway.  I was looking for another "best friend", preferably a white/off-white long hair.  What I got was so far removed from that image words fail to express it.

Rosie is a long hair, all gray down to his toe pads - only his tongue is pink.  He was a cute little sucker (literally, but I'll get to that in a minute).  I knew he was going to be a big cat.  At 4 1/2 months his ears and paws were huge in proportion to the rest of his body, so I decided he needed a big-cat name.  I thought Nicholas would be a fair representation of the cat he would become.  I couldn't have been more wrong!  Now, he loved people initially, and in particular, loved to suck on your arm, your shirt, whatever was readily available.  He had to be all over you to the point that I threatened to "sell him down the river".  He was just a very loving kitten.  I feel that part of his problem was that he was "fixed" too soon.  He was only 4 1/2 months old when we got him and it was done before that.

Back to the naming part.  Since Nicholas didn't pan out, I needed to come up with something else.  For lack of anything better, my husband started calling him "Bud".  At that point, I said he's more like a Rosebud, and thus he was named.  Mostly we call him Rosie or Rose.  He is indeed a big cat at around 14 lbs.  He is long, with long legs and a mane like a small, gray lion.

He is still my little boy, and one of my best-est friends.


 
Click to enlarge




3 comments:

  1. Cute to know how he was named. When you said he was Rosie.. I immediately thought of the name Rosebud. There was an episode of Dick Van Dyke show when we learn that Ritchie's middle name is Rosebud. Only it was an acronym for Robert Oscar Sam Edward Benjamin Ulysses David.

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  2. I think I remember that episode. Wasn't Ritchie embarrassed about the name and they explained how it came about?

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  3. That's exactly it. They gave him the reasons behind each name. The grandparents all had opinions about what his name should be and why. Some of the names were the same as the grandparents. Sam was "a name you can do business with!" One of the grandparents declared "Ulysses David or Ulyssesia Davida if it's a girl. That's it!"

    Of course it was playing with the story line from Citizen Kane and the mystery behind the name Rosebud but it was a great episode from one of my all time favourite TV shows.

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