June 25, 2003, was the 18th anniversary of the day Critter adopted me -- I found him outside a ZCMI department store in Orem, Utah. He was less than a year old, and so ill that it took him three months to regain enough strength to jump onto a bed.
It's difficult to know just how old he was in either cat or human years, but my best guess is that he was born in summer or early fall 1984. At his death on 3 July 2003, he was on the verge of 19, which translates to about 92 in creaky Critter years.
He lived with me in Utah, Washington, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and California -- a cosmopolitan cat. His longtime companion cat, Shrimp, died suddenly at age 13 on 7 November 2001. Critter missed Shrimp enormously; on Thanksgiving Day 2001, Critter stood outside Shrimp's doghouse in the rain and waited for Shrimp to come out.
Critter once saved me from a gas leak in an old kitchen stove in our house in Pennsylvania. I couldn't smell the gas, but Critter could. He followed me to the front door and nipped at my legs until I followed him back to the kitchen. He stood in front of the stove and howled until I checked the pilot light and turned off the gas line.
When someone left the garage door open in Pittsburgh once, Critter sneaked to the basement and let himself out to wander the neighborhood. As I drove down the street on my way to church that morning, I saw a little grey butt sashaying down the sidewalk.
So I stopped, followed the little grey butt on foot, and found him crouched under a neighbor's bushes. When I reached in to pull him out, he hissed at me for disrupting his freedom. This was, of course, the same purring beast who had rubbed my ankles in thanks for breakfast only moments before.
Even after he was blind, he was alert for opportunities to sneak outside through the garage or the front door. More than once, I found him standing in front of the open garage door to survey the World Outside. The day before he died, he sneaked out while Richard was putting out the garbage early in the morning. We found him a few minutes later, two doors down the street.
Inside the house, he navigated mostly with his whiskers, his nose, and his memory. He bumped along through the house like a little fuzzy pinball,
slowly bouncing from wall to wall.
When he could still jump up on the furniture, he used lamps for ear-warmers.