Sir Lancelot, The Lion Hearted

By

Katherine Tapley-Milton

I was living alone in my apartment and felt very lonely and depressed,

so a friend drove me to the SPCA to look for a cat. None of them

appealed to me, so I almost left in despair, alone again. However, my eye

caught a momentary splash of orange in a dark cage at the corner. There

was a sign on the cage not to poke your finger in it, yet I felt compelled to

do so. Immediately, an orange paw reached out to touch my finger. We

asked to see the skinny orange tabby and a worker brought him out of the

cage for us to pet. “This is the one I want!” I told my friend. She said, “I

don’t know. Look at his fur – it’s coming out in patches.” Just then the

orange tabby rubbed his head on me and that clinched it. I would take

him home and nurse him back to health. The shelter insisted that I have

the cat declawed, and neutered. So I left him in the city to be operated on.

When I came to get him he was awfully sleepy and his paws hurt him. I

decided to call him “Sir Lancelot”, because I was single and needed a
knight in shining armour. Little did I know that he turned out to be my

cat in shining armor.

My friend admitted, “He’s what you need and you are what he needs.”

Poor Lance had fleas, ear mites, and a tape worm. Between my friend and

I we cleaned his ears up and the vet gave him a pill for the worm. For the

first year that I had him, I was totally focused on trying to help Lance

regain some health. The shelter said that he was two years old, but he was

still quite playful and kittenish. Lance has always been acutely tuned into

my emotional state. If I am depressed he will make eye contact with me

and cuddle to get me feeling better. He especially likes it when I read a

novel and he places his head on my sneaker using it like a pillow.

Although I had feline love in my apartment, I still craved human love,

so I put a personal advertisement on a dating site called, “Adam Meet

Eve” and soon I had an email from a man named Dave. He and I had a lot

in common and soon Dave started travelling the 200 miles to see me at

my apartment. Since it was a one bedroom apartment I had to put an air

mattress on the living room floor so Dave could stay overnight. He suffers

from Dystonia which is a rare medical condition that gives him neck

spasms. I could relate to illness, since I have bipolar mood disorder and

fibromyalgia. One night, Sir Lancelot placed himself over Dave’s mouth
and nose and tied to suffocate him. I think that this was a jealous rage on

Lance’s part, since he wanted to eliminate the competition for my

affection.

Lance is ten years old now and Dave and I have been married for six

years. Today, Lance loves Dave and accepts him. We have three other

cats – Merlin, Caddy, and Rosa. That makes a matched pair of two

orange tabbies and two grey and white cats. Lance gets along with all his

feline friends and continues to be my cat in shining armour. He howls

when I go away and doesn’t calm down until mommy is back home.

Lance especially hates to see suitcases come out and will lie on top of

them to try to prevent me from leaving on a trip. He even knows how to

listen to me on the telephone when I speak into it from far away and he

sends me kitty kisses. Lance continues to be a therapy cat for both Dave

and I and has a “healing position” -- lying on top of one of us with his

paws extended and his eyes closed in concentration. The extended paw

was what brought us all together. I know that with that orange paw Lance

chose me as his human that day eight years ago when I saw him on death

row.