The Story of Sam

Once there was a very tiny kitten with enormous ears named Sam, short for Samson. He came from the kitten store, also known as University Aquarium, a pet store where people sometimes brought in litters of stray kittens so they could find good homes. The store had a nice veterinarian lady who made sure the kittens were healthy and gave them their baby shots.

He came home to live with Jim and Chris, and was so small he could hang out behind the keyboard on Chris' computer desk without taking up any room at all.

And sometimes he slept there, in comically cute postures:

He looked up to his big sisters Abby...

...and Emma, who were pretty nice to him even though they weren't sure the house really needed another kitty. Especially one who sometimes got rambunctious and jumped on them for fun (which always made them growl).

But Sam didn't mind, and he played all day, with pretty much anything he could get his little paws on. One thing he really liked to play with was the glass of water that the kitties drank out of. He stuck his paw in it and watched the water move, or he'd push it around on the floor. This led to quite a few spills. He also liked to play with Chris' old measuring tape and eventually chewed the first few inches off both ends, making it not very useful for measuring things any more.

When he was done playing he'd fall asleep with his little striped tummy in the air.

One day he met a curious neighbor cat through the window. When he was big enough to go outside, Neighbor Cat would sometimes come around and play chase games with him, which was nice because his big sisters weren't very playful.

And then Sam started growing at an alarming rate. He didn't fit very well on the keyboard shelf anymore, and kicked the keyboard out of the way....

...until he finally didn't fit there at all and had to find other places to sleep. Here he is only about 6 months old and getting quite long:

When Jim's sister Eileen saw pictures of Sam, she said he looked like a Maine Coon cat. Chris looked this up on the internet, and found all sorts of interesting facts about the cat breed. One of which was that they get very, very large. And they often have little tufts of fur on the points of their ears, like this. Sam had little tufts, not as pronounced as the show cats had, which you can see pretty well in the picture above. And they have fur that is especially good for keeping them warm in cold climates, which was good, because he lived in Michigan. And sure enough, as he got bigger he started growing a very fine mane of fur around his neck, and kept getting fluffier and fluffier.

Sam was always curious about everything Chris and Jim did around the house, and helped as much as he could. Here he is inspecting the cabinet that Chris was getting ready to sand and refinish.

He liked to go outside every chance he could, no matter how cold the weather was. He always went out to help when Chris or Jim went out to shovel the walks. Sometimes when he came in from playing in deep snow, he got little blobs of snow stuck to the fur on his tummy, and Chris or Jim would dry him off with a towel.

It turned out that those enormous ears did indeed make Sam a good mouser, as Jim's family had always maintained. Chris and Jim had a mouse in their basement, which sometimes broke into a bag of rice, or a bag of leftover Halloween candy, and left tiny teethmarks in the chocolate. Well...let's just say that Chris kind of freaked out when Sam chased that mouse upstairs one night, and wouldn't let go, and...it was all very disturbing. But, no more mouse problem!

And he kept getting longer and longer and fluffier...

...until finally he outgrew even his big sisters!

He hasn't been to the vet to get weighed for a few months, but he's just about as heavy as Abby is so I would estimate he's 14 lbs or so. He's about 32 inches from his head to the end of his tail when he's stretched out like he is in the picture above, and about 16 inches tall when he's sitting up. (Although it's very hard to measure him, because he hasn't outgrown playing with measuring tapes!)

But he's only a year and a half old, which is not really full grown, so who knows how big he's going to get?