Socrates as Persephone

This started as a reply to a friend on Facebook, who happily just found his cat in the attic after not seeing her for two days. I don't know that I've ever put this into writing, but it's a story Demetrius and I have told many times.

Our first cat, Socrates. didn't eat for the first week we had him. We adopted him from a shelter near our apartment in Chicago. Place was called Happy Tails, and I don't think it's there any more. Anyway, we were on a bike ride, but stopped in to look at the kitties. Ended up walking the bikes home, carrying a black cat named Socrates in a box. That was the easiest time we ever had naming a cat--we both thought of the name independently at the same time. Vulcan mind meld or something.

Anyway, this was my first experience of a shelter where the cats were walking around loose and not in cages. Socrates "chose" us--just pretty much attached himself to us and followed us the whole time. So we HAD to adopt him. 

The best I can figure it, Socrates thought he was inviting us to stay at his place and hang out with him. He was decidedly unhappy about being put inside a box (maybe someone told him about Shrodinger), and didn't seem to get much happier when we got back to Demetrius' apartment and let him out of the box.

Disclaimer time...I know that we humans misremember things all the time. We call up memories over the years, and gradually some of the details change. But, according to my memory, Socrates spent his first week in that apartment lying down in his litter box. I remember thinking that he was creating a visual metaphor: "My life is in the toilet right now."

I also remember that the first thing Socrates ate in that apartment was a little shred of chicken from a sandwich Demetrius brought home from Wendy's. I can't say for sure if I brought it to him where he was lying, or if he came to me to check out the yummy snack I was holding. But I offered him a little bite of chicken, and he ate it. 

Socrates and Moxie

According to the rules I learned from the myth of Persephone, eating the food we gave him meant he had to stay with us forever. So I guess it took him a week to decide that for sure.