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Skeesix Corazon Moore
Skizzy was a blind (actually, eyeless) gray/black American shorthair tabby who lived with me since she was 4 weeks old (she was born in May 1995). The offspring of feral parents, she was apparently born with a cold that ultimately affected her eyes; they were surgically removed when she was a few weeks old. Her mother had moved her into my car while I was on vacation.
Lest you think "oh, poor kitty," let me rush to point out that Skeesix didn't think she was missing anything -- she'd never seen the world. She got along spectacularly well.
Though she was a bit skittish of new places, she knew her house like the back of her whiskers, and raced up and down and up and over the furniture during her "midnight crazies". She didn't "discover" the stairs until she was about 9 months old; after she figured out how to climb up and down, she'd race me, almost always arriving at the bottom of the stairs first and turning to leap at my ankles. She played hide and seek with Su-Su, and "looked" out the screen door. She drove visitors a little crazy with her penchant for escorting them into the bathroom (they were always instructed to not shut the door until she was inside.
Her favorite games were chasing a feather, playing fetch with a crinkly piece of paper, and "capturing" my fingers when I wiggled them in the air (she was very good at that!). She'd follow a leather string moving across the carpeted floor and grab it every time - we'd spent hours when she was a kitten "practicing"; she was so good that she could leap over my legs and grab the end of the string when it was halfway across the room.
Skizzy investigated each visitor thoroughly, and would quietly curl up on top of their feet, patiently undoing their shoelaces. She knew each visitor by their smell; the day my sister came to visit was hysterically funny: Skiz could smell the two dogs, two cats, goat, and horses on her, and sat back about a foot from her, tapping the air to figure out where the person actually was in the middle of all that.
She liked exploring the out of doors (I always went with her), and she figured out how to get to the catnip patch in the garden by herself, by following the fenceline. When I'd weed the garden, she'd climb onto my back and lie down.
She enjoyed music, and would sit at her favorite spot on the sofa, ears perked forward if she liked a tune. If she didn't like it, she would jump down and climb up on the chair across the room.
One of my favorite memories of Skizzy are her "little kitty kisses." While relaxing on my arm, she'd find my face with her paw - then reach up and softly lick my lips a couple of times.
When Skizzy was 18 months old, she was diagnosed with an inoperable tumor in the vestibular area of the brain and was put to sleep. All the cat-related pages here are my memorial to her, my little kitty with a heart.
