Lucy

I named her after the Lucy character in the Chronicles of Narnia. The Narnia Lucy represents the child of faith, the one who sees, the one who trusts, the one who courageously believes despite the doubt of her siblings. I love that character.

Lucy our cat does not live up to her name, unfortunately. She's needy, insecure, whiny, demanding, and has abandonment issues. I adopted her from Paw's Chicago -- a great organization that is trying to turn Chicago into a no-kill city. At one time, Chicago was euthanizing over 40,000 domestic animals a year in order to control the population of strays and unwanted animals. With the help of PAWs and other organizations, that number is down to around 20,000 animals a year. Cities like San Francisco have successfully eliminated the need for euthanizing animals....Chicago is trying to do the same.

I was told that someone found Lucy in the middle of Armitage avenue in Chicago. They brought her to PAWs, where I was volunteering at the time. I was looking for a second cat, and thought she would be the perfect companion for my cat, Ivy (who I wrote about in July 2005 post). Well, Lucy and Ivy never became friends and I lived in the midst of a cat fight for 5 years. Ivy died of cancer last fall, and now Lucy is the one and only pet....just the way she likes it. David and I enable her neediness, I'm sure. We feed her when she wants, we give into her demands for "play time" with her piece of yarn....she has us wrapped around her little paw. We call her The Parasite because she's constantly glued to one of us. We can't sit down without her jumping up on our lap. She's annoying. But we love her anyway....