Cappy and the Phoenix Felines

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Stories about Phoenix mascots from: THE DOG WHO ONLY ATE TACOS and Other Animal Stories by Jessica Reynolds (Shaver) Renshaw (posted on Kindle):

                                  THE ONLY DOG IN JAPAN

I grew up in Ohio.

I grew up in Japan.

I grew up on a boat.

They’re all true. I was born in Xenia, Ohio (See “The Whole Family Goes Squirrelly”) to a family which consisted of :

1. A father born to German immigrant parents and raised in an itinerant circus, who had worked his way up to a PhD in physical anthropology from the University of Chicago, a renaissance man who was teaching at Antioch College, winning tennis championships on weekends, and writing plays in his spare time.

2) A mother chafing at the role of traditional homemaker who wrote children’s books in her spare time. 3) Two older brothers, Tim and Ted, who were 8 and 6 when I was born and mostly saw me as an object to tease and a source of comic relief. I was too little to remember some of the fun family times where I was only old enough to be a prop.

Or the animals. Tim says he had a red setter and then a “furry” dog named Treeve and Ted had an all-black dog named Cerberus, Cerby for short--and I’m sure we had a cat or two. Tim found a baby raccoon in nearby Glen Helen (I was too young to tramp around the Glen but here is a picture of me with Sammy) and Mum wrote her first children’s book, Pepper, based on Tim’s adventures with the raccoon. Ted had hamsters and Mum’s second book, Hamlet and Brownswiggle was about them.

Then Dad was transferred by the Atomic Energy Commission to Hiroshima, to study the growth and development of Japanese children who survived the first nuclear bomb. Mum would eventually write a book for me, Emily San, about an American family in Japan. The family in her novel had pets, a dog and a cat, just like us.

I do remember Cappy. “Cappy” was short for Caprice and she was a Papillon but Dad said she was a Capillon. That’s the kind of silliness with words we generated in our family. (We all became writers.) I was seven when we moved to Japan and Cappy (along with our Woody station wagon) went with us.

So for the next three years I grew up in Japan. It was 1951 when we arrived in Tokyo and though World War 2 had been over for six years, we could still see its effects as we drove south on bomb-damaged roads. We saw shirtless men balancing baskets of broken rock on poles across their shoulders, women working in the rice paddies, and groups of curious children, all in threadbare clothes, all with runny noses. If we stopped anywhere, they would gather around the only foreigners they had ever seen who weren’t soldiers, jostling each other eagerly as they held out their hands and asked us for “chewingu gammu.”

But we didn’t see any animals, not even birds. Someone told us that was because during the war starving Japanese had eaten them all. Children all seemed to like Cappy, with her perky stance from pointed nose to curled-over tail. They all wanted to pat her.

I think for awhile Cappy was the only dog in Japan.

 

                                                                          PHOENIX MASCATS (FELINES)

The calico without a tail/ Cats and bananas

During our three years in Hiroshima, Dad had designed and built a 50-foot yacht, in which we were going to sail around the world. By 1954 the Phoenix of Hiroshima was ready to launch—and immediately people started giving us calico cats “for luck.”

Dad (now “Skipper”) and Mum figured a cat’s retractable claws could hang onto a rolling boat better than a dog’s could. So they found Cappy a good home, and replaced her with a calico cat with a characteristic Japanese bob-tail, more of a powder puff really. We named her Mi-ke (Mee-keh, lit. "three hairs").

My brother Ted sailed with us; our oldest brother Tim went back to the States for boarding school—so we replaced him with three Japanese yachtsmen. Dad was captain, Mum was cook, Ted was navigator, and it was my job to write a journal (as part of my “boat-schooling”) and "keep the cat(s) warm." Mi-ke could not only keep herself from sliding on the rolling yacht, she could gimbal, like our kerosene lanterns and stove. Even while asleep. She was good company for me.

I'll bet you didn't know that you can split a banana lengthwise into three exactly equal parts. Just peel and squeeze gently at one end until you see the lengths start to separate. Then draw them away from each other, one at a time.
I'll also bet you don't know that the nap on a cat's nose goes in four different directions. Just peel and squeeze gently at one end--no, wait, that was the banana. Hold cat gently under one arm and with the pointy finger of the other hand stroke the nose from the middle up, down, and in from each side. Wait a minute, let me be sure that's right. Sudoku, come here. Yes, that's right.

You'd only know something like that if you spent a lot of time with cats. I did.

Anyway, over the next 4 years, as we sailed from Japan to Hawaii, the South Seas, New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, St. Helena, Ascension, Brazil, the West Indies, New York,  the Panama Canal, Marquesas, Galapagos, Hawaii (again) and full circle to Japan, we had a dynasty of mascot cats on the Phoenix. I guess you could call them mascats. Each one has its own personality quirks.

Our maiden voyage from Japan to Hawaii took 48 days as Ted led us unerringly to Honolulu. Quarantine officials there immediately confiscated Mi-Ke. They kept her in isolation for four months and they didn't count the 48 days she'd already served.

She did get sprung in time to get pregnant before we headed for Tahiti. In Papeete while we were watching the Bastille Day festivities in town, she gave birth to five kittens, each uniquely decorated and each with some approximation of a tail. We kept the black one, which we named Manuia ("Good luck" in Tahitian) and distributed the rest among friends we made in the Society Islands. Fifty years later, I wonder how felinologists are accounting for all the bob-tail cats there must be throughout the South Pacific!

In Wellington, New Zealand, we were berthed at Queen's Wharf, right downtown. We could hear the comments of those who spent their lunch break looking at the Phoenix as they ate their fish and chips. Someone read the name on our boat's stern: Phoenix of Hiroshima. "They came all the way from Hiroshima," he announced. The little girl with him noticed Mi-ke sleeping in the furled mainsail. "Oh, look at the poor little pussycat!" she cried. "It must have lost its tail in the atom bomb!"

No, not that we know of. They're just born that way.

The cats who traded kittens

The kitten who almost walked the plank

The cat who rang for breakfast

Demoralized Daimyo

Peace-and-Friendship

When Manuia grew up, she and her mother got pregnant at about the same time and had kittens within a day or two or each other, one litter in the skipper's bunk and one in mine. Chaos ensued as the first to deliver discovered the second litter in my bunk and, thinking they were her babies, started carrying each one back to the others, while the newer mommy went to retrieve her own babies from Skipper's bunk and ended up bringing back the wrong ones. Finally we just heaped all the kittens together in a box and let them nurse mother or grandmother.

When they grew old enough to explore, one of the kittens managed to fall into the opening between the planks along my bunk and the hull. She was clinging to the top of the plank from the hull side and from there she would have fallen into the oily water of the bilge. Dad (Skipper) reached across my bunk and ripped the middle out of that 1x8" board. It must have been about 12 feet long and he ripped the middle out of it without it cracking lengthwise or anything. Thankfully the kitten came along with it and was safe.

I'm glad we had one of Mi-ke's offspring aboard because one evening in the Arafura Sea two years later Mi-ke did not show up for dinner--or breakfast. We had to face the fact we had lost her overboard.

From then on there was always at least one cat aboard but they became less and less memorable to me. Manuia gave birth to one tiny, rather sickly black kitten, whom we named Hobson's Choice, or Hobby for short. I'm not sure the blood line actually carried any farther. Manuia jumped ship in Cape Town, South Africa and even though a friend found her and brought her to the dock as we were pulling away from it, Skipper wouldn't attempt to close the yawning gap between us and go back for her. (A 30-ton ship with an 18-hp engine is hard enough to maneuver as it is.)

There was Amya (the acronym for American Yachtsmen's Association) and Heiwa, which is "peace" in Japanese, and Princess. One of them--I have mercifully forgotten which one --nursed herself. There was Duchess, named for her supercilious attitude. I think Duchess was the one that learned to ring the ship's bell, mounted, for some reason, by Ted's bunk. Any time she got hungry, day or night, she would trot up the ladder to Ted's bunk, step over to the row of encyclopedias lined up alongside it and hit the clanger with her paw with loud but monotonous regularity until someone fed her. We finally stuffed something in the bell to silence it. (Better than stuffing something in her to silence her, which is what we all felt like doing at three in the morning.)

There was Daimyo. “Subordinate only to the shogun, daimyo were the most powerful rulers from the 10th century to the middle 19th century in Japan. Daimyo often hired samurai to guard their land.” (Wikipedia) Having explained what a daimyo is, I have no idea why we named a (female) cat Daimyo. She sailed with us on a rough passage across the sea from Japan to the USSR in 1961 when we protested Soviet nuclear testing. (We had already protested American atmospheric testing in the Pacific in 1958.) The trip totally traumatized Daimyo (and just about did the same to us). When we came back to the dock we had left in Japan she jumped ship and was never seen again.

Mir i Droozba, (Russian for Peace-and-Friendship), called Miri for short, was on that trip also. Petite, delicate but with a spirit as buoyant and adventurous as Roo (as in Kanga-and- in Winnie the Pooh), she thought all the rainwear hanging at odd angles out into the passageway and the items that came unstowed and hurtled past her as we pitched and rolled were novelties for her amusement. The miserable trip was great fun to her. She added insult to injury by pouncing on already-traumatized Daimyo's tail or biting her ear in play.

Daimyo and Miri are described in my book To Russia with Love.

I kept paw prints of every Phoenix pet with a tuft of its fur.