Twelve-year-old Dandy is a rags-to-riches story. He was born to a stray mother and lived in a garage until he was four months old. Neighborhood children dubbed him “Splat” due to his propensity for sitting in the middle of the street grooming himself. Finally, Dick’s daughter played on her dad’s sympathy enough that he took the kitten home as a replacement for their recently departed and beloved cat. Splat did not know how to act when he first arrived in his new air-conditioned home! He spent the first night sleeping on the pillows between his new owners; however, that didn’t last long as Dick woke up the next morning with his eyes swollen shut!
The Gaskills decided that Splat was no longer an appropriate name so, because he is a black and white tuxedo cat, and as the vet said, “A real dandy!,” he got a much more fitting name. Dandy settled into the good life and was especially happy once the Gaskills moved to North Carolina 10 years ago. They assumed he would be content on their screened porch, but that was not the case. After he head-butted the screens out day after day, he finally won the battle and got his own cat door. His daily routine involves sleeping under a bed until late afternoon, then sleeping on the screen porch awhile, and doing a little roaming after that. He always comes in at night, with the exception of two times when he disappeared for a few days at a time. He may have lost some of his nine lives during those adventures but we don’t know for sure. He has also been fished out of our canal on two different occasions!
But Dandy has turned out to be an elegant-looking cat who loves shrimp and hates children, lives a life of cat luxury on his own schedule, and brings a lot of joy to the people he allows to live with him. We hope that he still has many of his cat lives left.