We’ve got two bookstore cats – Reyn (who has a photo on our MySpace page) and Grendel. As Reyn has had his photo displayed in the past, we thought Grendel might appreciate the same. And since this month’s blog topic is big, it would be especially fitting.
Grendel is a cautionary tale on naming pets. We adopted him in 2001 as a cute, tiny kitten and thought it would be amusing to name him after the monster in Beowulf (Obo was a 6th grade humanities teacher at the time, and taught Beowulf every year as part of his curricula). Grendel has had the last laugh. He turned into an absolutely huge cat (nearing 20 lbs.), who can be a bit of a bully to our older cat Reyn, and absolutely terrorized my mother’s cat when we took her in for a few weeks. To be fair, he’s a very nice cat with people – loving and sweet – it’s just other cats he’s a jerk around. But we love him all the same.
