The significance of "Colors of Tabby"

I wrote Colors of Tabby in September of 2002 about our cat Tinker. Tinker was a tabby cat whom we brought with us from the United Kingdom to the United States. She was one of two cats we had while we lived in the United States; I posted previously a rhyme about Smudge, our other cat, here.

Most verses in the poem are about Tinker, although a couple are nonsense purely for rhyming purposes. For example, "Colors of tabby, Partially flabby" refers to the fact she was a tabby and somewhat overweight; "While braver than voles, She’s chased by lizards and forced into gopher holes" is a reference to her hunting voles in the first couple of years or so of life, but at the time of the poem's writing she had completely lost interest in hunting other animals (she backed away from lizards).

As for a bit more about Tinker, she was a social cat: she would often greet people when they came over...there was one time when she had not seen my grandparents for two years, yet when my grandmother entered our house and started talking, Tinker remembered her and came bounding into the living room to enthusiastically greet her. Tinker loved being brushed (especially by me), playing with Smudge, wanting food whenever one of us went into the kitchen or she heard us open the fridge door (she did this more in her later life, and it was our food she was after, not her own), and looking out of open windows (she became an indoor cat when we moved to America, and she came to prefer looking out of open windows to actually going outside). She was a happy cat, as she was near-constantly purring, and it took a lot to anger her.

Yesterday, February 12th, was the third anniversary of Tinker's death, and I decided that a fitting tribute to her would be to post a poem that I wrote a long time ago about her. Tinker's death can be put down to old age, as she was fifteen years old, and would have been sixteen in May of 2009. She had been losing weight for the six months prior to her death, but she had been behaving normally during that time: in fact, she was more active than usual in her last six month of her life until the final two weeks.

It would be great it our pets lived as long as we do, but sadly, they do not. The most we can do is to ensure that they are given the best and happiest lives as possible in the time that they have: Tinker had a good, long, and eventful life.