When my husband Morgan and I started dating, we discovered that we each had one cat…and that each of those cats, his a male and mine a female, was named Tigger! To differentiate which feline we were talking about, we prepended “Princess” to my Tigger’s name, and “Mr.” to his Tigger. (We tried King Tigger and Prince Tigger, but Mr. Tigger’s plebeian roots kept showing.)

Mr. Tigger, who appears to be a Somali Cat, was adopted by my husband years before we met. We think he was born in about 1995, which if true means he is approaching 20 as I write this in 2015! Mr. Tigger spent his early years with Morgan acting the part of wandering neighborhood brawler, and he has the scarred ears and missing teeth to show for it.

When Princess Tigger and I moved in with Morgan, I was worried about rough-and-tumble Mr. T bullying my sweet ballerina kitty. We carefully followed the advice of vets and experts everywhere to introduce the cats. We shut Princess Tigger into the guest bedroom with her food and water and litterbox, anticipating that over the course of a week or two the cats would get acquainted with each others’ scents through the door. The theory was that curiosity about what was on the other side of the door would eventually drive them to want to meet nose-to-nose. Not a bit of it. We never once caught Mr. Tigger sniffing at the door, and the Princess exhibited no desire to come out of “her” bedroom.

About two weeks into “operation cat merger” we left the door of Princess Tigger’s room open. When Mr. Tigger strolled down the hall that morning, the Princess gave a warrior-cry ululation that would have made Xena proud, chased Mr. Tigger the length of the house, and backed him into a corner. I managed to grab her and open the front door for his escape, and we didn’t get Mr. Tigger back inside for three days! (He got al fresco dining service on the back deck during this time, of course, whenever he worked up the nerve to appear out of the bushes.) I felt horrible, but the Princess strode around the house like her name was on the title.

It took weeks for Mr. Tigger to work up the courage to be in the same room with the Princess, and months before we could all sit on the couch or curl up in bed together, but eventually — perhaps because we introduced a puppy they could mutually loathe? — they reached detente.

Princess Tigger died in 2010 at the age of 19. I still miss her, but I don’t think Mr. Tigger does!

UPDATE: In June 2015 Mr. Tigger died of an apparent heart attack after an encounter with an off-leash dog that ran into our front yard. This happened just before we relocated from California to the Pacific Northwest. Although we miss him, we wonder if perhaps he chose his own timing, to spare himself the discomfort of leaving his lifelong home.