I have had a whole bunch of photos from the mid-to-late-90’s scanned. The photos had been boxed up for years. I previously have only had a couple of pictures of the cats from their first couple of years. Now I’ve got several dozen, including a few from mid-May 1996 when I first got Aremid. I had not recalled him being a kitten, but photographically evidence bears out that he was a bit kitten-like.

Not of the highest quality, obviously. However, Aremid didn’t look much different between, say 1997 and 2007, so discovering these means a lot to me.

During this round of illness, I’ve been missing the one thing that comforted me the most–Aremid. He was a reliable security blanket in all sorts of rough times. I could always count on him to curl up right up again me, or to drape his front paws over my arms or my chest. Sometimes, I would have to go grab him from somewhere else, but he almost always stayed put wherever I placed him. He was the best.

My other cat, no matter how much I love her, will never do these things. It’s not in her nature, not after spending 15 years as the second cat who always saw Aremid getting my initial attention. I think she learned to stay out of the way. She’ll lie on the bed a foot away, but she doesn’t cuddle. She wants to be left alone.

The grainy photo above is what I call “Healer VIII”, part of a series of poor-quality but meaningful photos to me of Aremid being there for me during times of healing. This one was taken three weeks after my transplant surgery.

I found some pictures from last August that I hadn’t gotten off my laptop and onto Flickr. There are three other similar ones. I’ll just post one here.

It’s not my intention to post a picture of Aremid every other day. I’m not in perpetual mourning. Nor have I yet taken an adequate amount of time to pore through all the photos I have and take stock of his 16 years. I wish I could just take A DAY to mourn my cat. You probably think I have because of the posts I’ve made here. But I haven’t. Life begets plenty of other pressing problems.

Tonight, I was going to start going through photos. I wanted to pick out some favorites for a little project. And I wanted to enhance and/or crop ones that I may have previously not tried to do anything with. Unfortunately, I found myself sucked into a vortex of hate for Flickr, which has been my repository of choice for about six years, I think. Flickr is inadequate in so many ways I won’t go into it. But instead of going through photos, I was sidetracked by trying to figure out, in vain, how to best download my Flickr photos.

ANYWAY…within the very first photos, I noticed this one, and I think of it as Aremid’s happiest time. There were a few brief weeks in this new apartment in Durham when I wasn’t out of town training for a new job and prior to getting Zellouisa. I just love this picture.

Summer 1997

Update
I’ve been looking at some other photos from his early years, and there are so many great shots, much better than this…I can’t post every time I see some great shot…I’ll put together the best ones, put them out in a few posts, and that’ll be that.

This is probably the last previously unscanned photo from 1996 that I’ve got and the closest I’ll get to finding a photo of Aremid as a kitten.

Never-scanned photo, circa 1996 or 1997.