This is Magnus, and he’s the wrong cat. We adopted him this summer, but we meant to adopt a different cat. We wanted another black cat to go with the reigning dark empress of our home, Grizelda, Grizzy. I’ve never seen my husband so taken with any pet we’ve ever had. Grizzy has chosen him as her “hooman” and she has us all wrapped her dainty black paw. She was at least six years old when we adopted her and she has totally won us over to adopting older cats. They come litter box trained, they aren’t the wrecking crew that kittens can be, and they’re just mellower energy. We are big fans of adopting an older cat, because that is the cat you’re getting, with kittens you have to wait two to three years to see what the true personality is going to be. So, we wanted a cat that was at least two years old, and six to eight on the high end, though for the right cat we were willing to go for ten, since Grizzy could be that old. We thought two older cats would have matching energy levels. We preferred black, because cat or dog, it’s one of the last animals to be adopted. An older black cat, or dog is almost doomed at a shelter. If we could find a cat that had FIV, Feline Immunodeficiency Virus , then that would be the full sweep of hard to place cat.
We had our list and our reasons for it, so we set out to adopt a second cat. We went back to the wonderful rescue that we got Grizzy from, St. Louis Pet Rescue, Stlpetrescue. But a weird thing kept happening, all the cats we were attracted to were young ones. They looked like grown cats and were about the size of our dainty Grizzy, but they weren’t. Seven months, eight, nine, always under a year, so we kept saying, no. Also, most of them were not black. We tried, and there was one very handsome black cat, with long curls, named, Sabbath. Black Sabbath, I mean how could we not love the name? He was a gorgeous cat and he knew it, very confident when we interacted with him in one of the small rooms. He had Grizzy’s confidence when she first walked into our home. Grizelda and Sabbath, nicely witchy and two black cats! My inner twelve-year-old who had wanted a black cat more than anything, was thrilled.
Sabbath bit us, not hard, not to bleed, but it hurt. He’d be rubbing up against us and purring, and then nip. We’d be petting and he’d love it, and he’d nip. The foster mom couldn’t understand it, he’d never done anything like that before. He was only seven months old so he might mellow, but he wasn’t going to mellow at our house. We passed on the handsome rogue.
She had one other cat with her that was male, two years old, sweet and laid back. His name was Sweetpea, and we’d walked right by him in his cage, when we spotted Sabbath. Sweetpea had been everything the other cat wasn’t, quiet, nervous, and not coping well with the chaos of the adoption event. We hadn’t given him a second look. He was a yellow tabby cat, but not dark gold, more pale, dilute tabby I think it’s called, so even for a tabby he didn’t stand out. His gold eyes blended with his face unlike the brilliant contrast of Sabbath’s yellow set in black. His foster even said, “He’s not very pretty,” as she got him out of the cage. But the moment the light him, his stripes showed more, and I instantly disagreed. And he was almost twice the size of the first cat, so double Grizzy’s size. He was a big, Tom cat. We took him back to the same small room where we’d just had the first cat. Sweetpea did not stroll around the room scent marking and owning the space. He sat in our laps, and I mean he sat from my thighs to my husband’s, like I said he was a big cat. He huddled there, startling anytime one of the dogs barked out in the adoption event. He shivered and was so scared. He just seemed to be saying, take me home, take me somewhere safe and quiet, get me out of here. We actually went home and discussed it, before saying, yes, because he was the wrong cat except for his age, he was nothing on our list, but in the end we said, yes.
We changed his name to Magnus Maximus, and within a few days he knew Magnus was his name. He was better with our two dogs than Grizzy, cuddling up with them in big piles. But it wasn’t a perfect fit between him and Grizzy, even though we did everything the rescue sites say to do about keeping them separate and a slow introduction. He was as social a cat as she was anti-social. She loves her humans, but she’d be our only pet if she could manage it. The fights that most cats do to establish territory inside a new place were scary because of his size. He just overwhelmed her. Even when she started it, she was just out of her weight class. We thought seriously about not keeping him, but we loved him. We started cycling them through parts of the house, Grizzy is still the only one allowed in my husband’s office. We still have to use the squirt bottles from time to time, but Magnus has worked hard for Grizzy to let him lay close to him, and she’s even let him groom her head a few times, until she bitch slaps him. He’s been very patient with her, and they can sniff noses without her growling. She even sniffed his tail the other day and when he swished it in her face she put her paw on his butt, like she does my husband when she’s grooming his hair and he moves too much, a tiny prick of claws that says, clearly stop moving. Magnus let her do it, just like my husband does, she really is our dark, bossy empress.
Did I mention that the trip to get Magnus checked by our vet came with a surprise? Vet said Magnus wasn’t two, he was between eight months and a year, so just a really big kitten. His size had made the rescue up his age, and when you have twenty fosters in the same house, who could blame anyone for the mistake? The vet said, he’d easily reach twenty pounds when he matured, so not what we bargained for, but by then, he was ours. There were doubts after that, see above, but we’re so glad we worked through it all and didn’t give up because once a cat goes back into rescue it can be harder to place them a second time, people wonder why they got returned, and usually blame the animal, when it’s usually just normal pet things that people give up on.
I woke up this Christmas morning with Magnus curled next to me purring like a motor under my arm. He sleeps most nights in the bedroom with us. Grizzy shares the bed usually on the other side of my husband away from Magnus, but for her, well, she likes Magnus in a cranky, non social cat way. She’s the house panther to his social lion. I keep threatening that we’ll get another lion for him to play with if she doesn’t start playing more with him, but she gives me that look, the one that says, I’m being ridiculous. I suppose I am, cats do not change unless they wish to, and Grizzy is very cat.
When I was six I wanted a white kitten, by age twelve I wanted a black one, but over the years the cats that have come the closest to being mine have all been ginger cats. One, my grandmother relented on and it fell ill and died before I could even get it a collar. The second belonged to a neighbor and I was still deathly allergic to cats, and we had parrots in our tiny apartment. That Ginger cat was a mighty hunter leaving bunnies and birds and other bits on my doorstep all spring and summer to try and bribe his way into the house. He’d have made short work of our parrots. I grew allergic to them, too, and so in the divorce my first husband got the parrot and I got the dogs. Twenty years of allergy shots and I can have cats! So Grizzy for my inner twelve-year-old, and the ginger cats can stop stalking me, because I have one of my own, at last. Magnus Maximus, Max, Magnus the Magnificent, Mags, Mag wheel, our house lion, our Magnus.
This is his first Christmas as a house cat. He was a stray last winter, a kitten in the snow, picked up in March of 2019 by a kill shelter. He was a big, adult looking Tom cat not flashy, scared and didn’t show well in his cage, if Stlpetrescue hadn’t pulled him in that same month and put him in foster care, he’d have been euthanized and that’s one of the reasons they rescued him, because his time was running out. I’m so thankful that they saved him. Thanks to Barb who fostered both our cats, and thanks to Sabbath for blowing his “coffee date” date with us, so we’d look behind the scared, quiet cat in the other cage and find the friendly, chatty, cat he has grown to be. I finally have a ginger cat for Christmas, now if I can just add that white cat for my inner six-year-old … husband says, no. Grizzy says, never! Dogs don’t care. Our daughter says, yes, please! Magnus says, a playmate, bring it on!