What the Cats Are Reading

Messi, the newest member of the Blanchett household, shouldn’t be living the high life in Pelican Preserve. In fact, having been found ricocheting through a traffic maze in a frenzied dash, the weeks-old kitten shouldn’t be living at all.

“It wasn’t easy,” she mewed in a rare moment of quietude, curling into Nancy’s lap of luxury. A colleague had rescued the tiny orphan in a busy intersection and posted her picture on a bulletin board.

Nancy, who can’t resist a young feline in distress, claimed the cat without asking her husband.

“You what?” Rick was astounded. Or perhaps he was hurt, not having been consulted. Always a multiple-cat household, the Blanchetts had decided to simplify their lives and adopt a single cat three months earlier, after their last cat had died. Mittens, a mature feline, had reigned supreme since her arrival.

Messi messed that up.

But when Rick cradled the stubby-legged, spunky kitten, he was all in. He dubbed her Messi, in honor of the Argentine soccer player.

I mistook the name as “Messy.”

“Oh, that too,” Rick said, pointing to a tornado-like pathway of torn cardboard boxes and half-devoured toys. “But Messi is one of the greatest footballers of all time, even with his short legs.”

Born with a growth hormone deficiency, Leo Messi’s agility and strength caught people’s attention at an early age. He received treatment for his pituitary-gland condition and is now the most decorated player in the history of professional soccer.

Messi Blanchett, however, needs no hormones—just a nutritious diet—to develop legs in proportion to height. But she has needed human intervention to facilitate living with Mittens.

“It wasn’t easy,” Messi mewed again, telling Rick that she had finally been able to cozy up to Mittens. The interaction came with mixed results. Messi was now teaching Mittens bad habits, like jumping up on the kitchen counter.

In the midst of this conversation about an impossibly onerous beginning, Messy landed—quite literally—on Paul Tennant’s memoir, It Wasn’t Easy, But I Made It, which was sitting on the sofa. Like most people who have read it, Messi was immediately sucked in.

See, Paul had overcome life’s odds, too.

The self-described “snotty-nosed kid” had caromed through the 1960s in an impoverished and crime-infested neighborhood in Nottingham, England. Like Messi’s legs, sometimes Paul’s didn’t work right, either. Indeed, he didn’t know until years later that he had spina bifida.

Unlike Messi, though, Paul wasn’t rescued. He survived an abusive childhood, took chances, and embraced good luck when it befell him. Significantly, he accepted a moment of grace that not only spared the life of an adversary but also saved his own soul.

While backpacking through the wine country of France, laden with supplies and all the money he had in the world, he was accosted by two thugs.

“As soon as I felt the man’s fingers inside my pocket,” Paul wrote, “I felt my anger rise. I remember reaching for my knife and starting to fight. … All I knew was fury pushing me to win at any cost.”

Amid his rage, Paul realized that one of the men had staggered away, begging him to stop. Paul had pinned the second man against a doorway with a knife pressed under his jawbone.

“A calmness came over me,” he recalled. “I slowly turned my head to the man trapped in the doorway and with a cold, justified urge I told myself, Kill him. The voice that told me to do this was rational and calm. I saw in the man’s eyes that he knew I was going to do it. He pleaded and begged.”

Realizing his position of control, Paul let the man go and the two robbers ran away. In reflecting on the incident as a visit to his “dark side,” Paul renounced his furious temper, refusing to become a tyrant like those who had molded his tormented youth.

Instead, he went on to secure a job on a cruise ship; earn a degree in hospitality management; and see the world as a sommelier, bartender, and tour director.

In the Cayman Islands, where he had abandoned ship to embrace the SCUBA life, he met and married Sue. They could have lived happily ever after in the paradise bungalow and life they had built. Instead, the couple moved to the U.S. to be closer to Sue’s parents.

After yet another successful career—in banking, no less—Paul retired. He and Sue moved to Southwest Florida, where his memoir caught Messi’s attention.

In the book’s introduction, Paul describes his new home as surrounded by sunny skies, palm trees, nice houses, and smiling neighbors. Messi looked up and saw the same.

“My life didn’t have a very promising start,” Paul wrote. Messi purred in agreement before once again zooming off in a kitten frenzy. No one would have predicted a happy ending for either of them.

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