ABOUT MEN
Feline version of man's best friend loved luxury of laps

By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

Mu'umu'u the cat wanted nothing more in life than to be held.

By the time he died the other day at the age of 18, Mu'umu'u had climbed into my lap thousands of times. He never got tired of doing it, and he never got mad when you had to put him down.

By my most conservative reckoning, Mu'umu'u climbed into someone's lap at our house about 12 times a day, a little less on weekdays, a lot more on weekends. Three-hundred sixty-five days a year for almost two decades. If you do the math, that comes to something like 78,840 lap naps in the course of his long, comfortable life.

Mu'umu'u first jumped into my lap as a 1-year-old at the Hawaiian Humane Society. My first reaction was to put him down; I was there to get a kitten, not someone else's trouble. As I looked around Hale Meow Meow, he climbed back into my lap. Then he did it again. And again.

What could I do? From that day forward, he never was any good at taking no for an answer.

We named him Mu'umu'u, but pronounced it Moo Moo, like the malihini we were at the time. Somehow it fit, because once he found his sweet spot, he resembled nothing so much as a contented cow.

He liked to sleep on your lap. Or between your legs. Or on your back. He liked the couch best of all, but was comfortable wherever you happened to be at rest: on the floor, at the dining table, in the hammock.

Over the years, Mu'umu'u became such an accomplished lap sitter that you often didn't know he was there until you had to get up to turn the channel, to visit the bathroom or get another beer. Only then, you'd have to ask yourself: "Now when did he get here?" By the time you were comfortably seated again, all 16 pounds of him were back, silently settled into your lap.

Mu'umu'u exuded rest vibes. Just being there made you — and him — sleepy. There were hundreds of times when Mu'umu'u and I would settle down on the couch to watch a baseball game and both be sound asleep together before the home team came to bat.

Of course, there was more to Mu'umu'u than his lap visits. He liked to wake you up at dawn and he liked to eat. Boy, did he like to eat. He enjoyed Little Friskies, tuna fish, ice cream, spaghetti and whatever happened to be left unattended on the kitchen table for a few minutes.

On the whole, though, he never stopped trying to be held. He'd start in the morning (right after his daily sip of milk) while you were trying to read the paper or get ready for work. And he'd still be at it near the end of the day, waiting for you when you climbed into bed.

He was a man's cat. I know this in part because of how often my wife said, "Do you know what your cat just did?" He was more dog than feline, really. He was never skittish, standoffish, high-strung or fickle, as cats are supposed to be. He knew what he wanted, and he knew where to find it — in the luxury of a lap.

Reach Mike Leidemann at 525-5460 or mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.