rei kimura

This is the heart warming story told by Abby, a veteran stray cat who insists, "We are not strays, we are community cats! Just as humans are citizens of their countries, we are citizens of the communities we live in!"

This book brings to life the many stray cats who live in almost every community, giving each cat featured in this book a face, a heart, feelings, thoughts and the same fear and happiness of the humans who can make their lives a blessing or a curse.

Abby, the macho yellow male cat walks us through his very colorful adventures and experiences as he and his siblings and friends live each day to the fullest of their nine lives, never knowing whether they will be alive at the end of the day! There is never a dull moment and some harrowing matching of wits with those who hate their very existence and believe that community cats should neither be seen nor heard!

The lead star of this witty community cat drama is Abby, strong, arrogant and adventurous, he is the boss and what he says goes! Then there is Choc, his brother, good natured, sanguine and a perfect gentleman who is wise and calm beyond his cat years!

It has even been said that a woman would choose Abby for a lover and Choc for a solid dependable husband!

 There is Calico, Abby’s friend and “crush,” pretty, precocious with a temper to match and her direct antithesis, Sister, a surly, snarling aging matriarch of the neighboring cluster of community cats  whom Abby calls “the ugliest and meanest feline that ever existed.”   

Each cat is a vibrant character of its own that you will mostly love as they share their lives with you. There is this rhetoric that every creature is created for a purpose so what on earth are community cats created for? Perhaps to bring out the compassion and better qualities in humans manifested here in the much loved “feeders” who feed and care for them, giving of their time and money to make the lives of these less fortunate creatures of God, tolerable.

The bond and love between feeder and community cat is very poignantly shared here and as Abby put it, “God, did everyone think that the only relationship between our feeders and us is food? Didn’t they know that we become attached to our caregivers as well and that’s why we wait eagerly the whole day for them to come so that we could have that little pat on the head, that ruffling of the fur or that nagging about not being choosy about food and our 30 minutes or so of love.”

“People came and went as and when they could and we were expected to deal with that, get over that emotional and missing someone we had become close to and loved stuff and just accept what and who came next. We were, after all, community cats, the lowest tier in the hierarchy of the cat society and that humiliating reality depressed me so much I crawled into the deep drain hole that had been our childhood home and cried for Helen. It just wasn’t fair that people, even our most beloved feeders, think that it doesn’t matter who comes to feed us because ultimately, it was just food we needed. But it does matter, it really does!

But in the morning, I woke up with a burning determination to survive and live on, we had a right to be in our community and we weren’t going anywhere because this was our home too!”

I remember the day a skeletal nursing female stray cat came to my table begging for table scraps so that she could have enough milk to feed her babies and my heart moved…..so began the love affair with community cats….   

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