Last month I mentioned my cat, Otis, in a post about one real estate agent’s costly errors in representing a client. To protect the agent’s anonymity, I assigned him the pseudonym Otis.

This time, I bring you a tribute to real Otis. My best buddy will turn 20 in a few days.

It was 2005. I can pinpoint the date as Saturday June 18. As in every year, I’d longed to be at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, which falls on the third weekend of June.

Instead. that day I had a mission: To adopt a kitten at the Foothills Animal Shetler.

Not just any kitten. I’d visited with a tiny black and white male in a cage in the lobby of the shelter. When I first saw Otis, he was too small to take home.

They made me wait until Saturday. At that point he was about a week old. So I figure his actual birthday was right around June 11.

Otis would join Charley, my then two-year-old tabby. Cats do better in pairs, and Charley had gone his whole life without feline companionship.

We arrived home and I freed Otis from his mobile cat carrier. He emerged, stopped protesting, and started looking around. I felt I could read his mind.

“Hey,” he was thinking, as he crossed the hardwood floor of the living room. “This just might work out.”

Charley wasn’t pleased. He pounced on Otis, who was a fraction of his size, and I feared, broke the little guy’s tiny leg. The terrified Otis started hiding and walking with a limp.

The vet assured me it was not a worry. The leg would heal, he said, and it did. With Otis’s mobility back to normal, he and Charley became best friends.

Not everyone loves cats. They seem aloof and overly independent. Which is a charade, of course, because they demand constant care and attention.  Personally I admire their attitude. They are not drama queens.

Time has passed and we are both 20 years older. I am middle-aged at best, and Otis is an old man. He has outlasted three other cats. First was Charley, who wandered off in 2008, never to be seen again.

Rocky arrived in 2009, adopted from the same shelter where Otis came from. Rocky would often scale the 35-foot peak of my Victorian house and greet me from above when I arrived home. He too was a free spirit and disappeared within a year.

Torey was a sweet, striped, mild-mannered girl who would cuddle up with Otis on cold winter days. One night she started howling, with eyes darting around madly. The all-night vet diagnosed her with a vestibular disorder affecting the ocular nerves.

Prescription meds seemed to help, but Torey was never the same. Her will to live was gone. Like the others, she exited via the dog/cat door and was never seen again.

Now Otis has been alone for six years, except for a few short dog visits. He got along well with all of them, and with every human he has ever met.

He loves all living creatures, but with due caution. Weighing in seven pounds, he is now about half his peak fighting weight. Otis has always had a strong sense self-preservation.

Our first Denver home was near a dog park. Neighbors would walk by daily with their leashed dogs. Otis would watch the world go by from a brick ledge on the front porch. He’d hop down and hide behind that barrier whenever he sensed trouble.

In two decades, I’ve had my own ups and downs. The entirety of my real estate career is shorter than the life of Otis. My divorce preceded his arrival by a few weeks. That was a motivator, I admit, for bringing some new life into the house.

The writer Charles Bukowski reportedly adopted a cat that had been shot, starved, and run over a car. The crippled animal arrived at his front door skinny, wet, and nearly frozen to death.

That cat moved in and hung onto life, dragging himself around without much use of his rear legs. If that animal could endure its troubles, Bukowski believed, he could bear his own.

Otis has had a relatively good life, with only one serious injury. A predator, maybe another cat, attached him in the back yard. It took weeks for his tail to heal. He has spread and shared with me his own self-preservation instinct.

Always a picky eater, he now turns up his nose at most everything I feed him. The 10,000 odd cans of Fancy Feast cat food that I’ve bought would fill the kitchen.

The cost of feeding Otis is around $500 per year. I’d pay in advance for ten more years if I could count on two.

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