A Cat's Life: Dulcy's Story

For the next few postings I’m going to share with you my ongoing love affair with cats. At SoulComfort’s Corner, Karma enriches Rita’s life. Beginning in April 1972, Dulcy enlightened mine.

            For those of you who believe in reincarnation she may once have been a high priestess in a shadowy Egyptian temple. If so, I was her lowly acolyte. Still later, she may have been a Celtic sorceress. And I? Undoubtedly, her apprentice. And in modern times, I suspect she played the imperious monarch; I, her court jester.

            We shared seventeen years together. Then death claimed her on July 6, 1989. Yet she did not leave me orphaned. Two days after her death, she began to relate, in her own soft purr, the shared memories of our life together: memories of her training me, tutoring me in ancient feline, inviting me beguilingly to become a one-cat person. I channeled her memoir, which was her final gift to me. It is, I believe, a love letter.

            My gift to her was getting her book published so that animal lovers around the world could rejoice in the pets with whom they lived and could grieve those who’d died. It took me three years to achieve that goal.

            Crown published Dulcy’s memoir as a hardcover in October 1992. Then in December 2000, J. N. Townsend Publishing in Exeter, New Hampshire, published the trade paperback of A Cat’s Life: Dulcy’s Story. In the span of those eight years, Dulcy’s book was published in Germany, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.

            Both US editions are now out of print. The last 670 copies of the trade paperback rest in seven boxes here in my office, awaiting readers. Please note that to the right of this post is the colorful cover of A Cat's Life: Dulcy's Story. Judy King, a gifted illustrator and friend, created that cover as well as the eighteen drawings within the book. Beneath that cover is the trade paperback purchase icon. 
            The pen-and-ink portrait of Dulcy is the Kindle e-book icon. It leads directly to her page on Amazon.com where several readers have posted five-star comments about A Cat's Life.             

            When Dulcy’s hardcover was published in 1992, I set up thirty-six readings and signing in the Twin Cities. The book sold almost 14,000 copies. Many people that year bought Dulcy’s story as a Christmas gift for both adult friends and children.

            In the past nineteen years, I have visited several classrooms in which teachers read Dulcy’s book to children as young as second graders. Dulcy delighted them. My heartwish is that animal lovers everywhere will also delight in her sweetness.

            After her death, my home became simply a house. Its soul was gone. In mid-July of 1989, I visited the animal shelter in Afton, Minnesota, and brought home three small kittens. They, too, are now dead and I live with three young Missouri cats. All of them are grateful to Dulcy for the training she gave me. She was not only priestess. She was taskmaster. And I? I was always her willing thrall.