His Majesty King Teo the 1st
-By Espen, the self proclaimed 'magnificently handsome norwegian'

The place is the kitchen. The year is 1997, early spring. I am preparing a meal. A co-student of mine has given me a huge chunk of roedeer meat. My co-student, bless him, has given me this partly to be nice to me, but mostly because he, due to a breakup with his girlfriend, no longer has got a deep freezer in which to keep all his roedeer meat . This breakup, and the events that lead to him having this colossal quantity of roedeer meat in the first place, is in itself a fascinating story. The current whisper through the grape-vine bushes says that Sharon is planning a new website that will occupy itself with the yet unexplored theme of "Relationships, roedeer meat and deep freezers". But I am digressing.....

Now..pay attention, class! Teo is sitting on the kitchen floor. His majesty is sitting some four feet behind me. I haven`t noticed him yet, and he may have been sitting there for quite some time.I see things in metres, you see. The difference between feet and metres is that if an infants arm is 30 centimetres long, the arm will in fact be one foot. Hey.. I am digressing again.

Where was I? Ah.. Teo is sitting 1.2 metres behind me, and has been doing so for quite a while. In deep thoughts, I suspect.
"How about the sauce?", I suddenly hear him say. "Have you started on the sauce yet? Sauce is really important. May I suggest a redwine-sauce? It will blend magnificently with....."

I cut him off. Now, you may consider this rude. But it isn`t. He does this all the time with me. It was our way.

"I am way ahead of you, Teo", I answer, throwing him a small slice of raw meat. "The sauce is to be a redwine thing, with stock, cream, mushrooms and some spices..estragon for sure.. and the rest.. we will have to see. I have prepared som broccoli as well, and there will be lots of potatoes..."

The meal, it must be said, was delicious. His royal highness King Teo the 1`st is a first class cook, a fairly capable philosopher, art critic and an exellent mousehunter.

He was born in 1994. His mother, a persian with some ridicolous name I cannot remember, is long dead. His father, whose name also eludes me, is also dead. Teo, as most newborn cats, was preposterously small. His face, lucky for him, was not very flat, as most persian cats`s faces are. Many was the times he told me how happy he was about this, since it allowed him to breath without that hideous surkling noise. And furthermore.. no runny eyes. And you do see his beautifull yellow eyes on the photo of him, don`t you?

Teo did not speak very much when he was small. His vocabulary largely consisted of nuances of the sounds "miaow!" and "meep!", but things were in for a rapid developement. You know how it is. Take any kitten and cuddle it. It will purr, stretch his jaw and perhaps it will reward you by wrapping his paws around your hand. If you for some reason stop your cuddling, sometimes the cat will let out a faint miaow. This will make you go "awwww!" and cuddle more, because you interpret it as a "cuddle me more..more..more!" After a while the cat will link up this in its mind, and it will come to you miaowing to be cuddled. I say.. go find an encyclopedia and look up Pavlovs dogs, and you will understand what I mean. Soon the cat will stand in front of doors miaowing. This means "Lemme out!" It will stand in front of the food bowl miaowing, and this will mean "Gimme eat!" Things like this develope.. you just have to read the context where the miaow is let out. This takes some practice, I can tell you. At any rate, if you take the effort, you soon will be able to hear the cat give you advices an comments about... well.. just anything. At one incident Teo placed himself in the middle of the living room, tilted his head slightly to the left and shifted his weight from paw to paw in a way none of us had seen before. He miaowed and gave a few meeps as well. Soon we realised that he in fact recited the highlights from Martin Luther Kings famous "I have a dream" speech. Now.. this was indeed astonishing. Teo, you see, is norwegian. He had translated the speech all by himself. You no doubt will agree that this was a miracle.

I do not live in the same house as Teo anymore. But he is having a happy life without me.. Cats are like that. I have met him in the street a couple of times since I moved, and even now, almost one year after I moved, he will come to greet me.

Now.. we are still in 1997. It is a bit later in the year, middle of May. I have just woken up.Teo has been out all night. As usual. I go to the front door opening it, expecting to be greeted by Teo. No such thing happens. I make no fuss about it. I figure he probably is just off somewhere having fun and will come back , or rather, materialise soon.. the way cats do. The way your cat does.... as in " And here.. all the way from the seventh dimension, or somewhere between time and Timbuktu, Starlet the magnificent siameese comes leaping forth from behind the teacup!!" That kind of thing.

As I am about to close the door and head off to the kitchen to make myself some hideous breakfast, I notice a grey little thing curled up in a bed of flowers. I call his name. His eyes turns towards me. He gets up, and lets out a miaow. He gets up, and starts moving towards me. And then I notice: He has broken his right front foot. It just dangles about, and Teo wheezes and whimper as he climbs the stairs. He does not speak to me.

Wake up household. Pandemonium. Tears. Phonecall. Vet. Teo is lying on the sofa.... his eyes so big you cannot see they are yellow. He tries to move a bit around, but has to quit due to the horrible pain he is in. He whimpers, and then recapitulate on the sofa again. We lift him up an place him in his cage to drive off to the vet. We bring half a pound of cheese with us, so that he can have something to nibble at, if he wants.

The vet says "ah.. well...this is serious. Very. I cannot do anything. he has to see an expert. chances are small... you might consider..." He stops..seing our reactions. "But I see you love this little fellow.. and you might try.. he looks brave."

The expert manages to mend things. We bring Teo home while he is down due to the narcosis. We have been told that he will wake up in some hours. The awakening is horrid. Teo does not know what to make of all this, and why his foot is so stiff. He toss and turns violently, while whimpering in pain. We try to hold him, but he really wiggles. He is awake, but not awake. After a few hours of this, during which I have lost the ability to see colours, hear birds sing and the belief in all good to mankind, I suddenly get a response when I look into his eyes. This is very early in the morning, and we have not slept. Teo has been strategically shaved, and the patches of fur lost makes him look incredibly small. Anyway.. his eyes looks back at me.... and from far and away he lets out a small weak "...I am not feeling too well today..! It is the weakest sound I have ever heard him make. But.. he is awake now, and he wants to move about. He has still to learn how. Strange things have happened to his legs. We cannot persuade him to lie down and take things easily. And we absolutely have, have, have, have to get some sleep. And at the same time we have to look after Teo. We solve the problem by making a sort of huge padded cage, with the aid of tables, chairs and mattresses. And then we head for sleep.

We wake up to find him very awake. He greets us with a slightly bewildered "What on earht is going on here?", and we let him out of his cage. He is, as you might expect, not in a good mode. But he soon learn how to cope with his predicament. He is to walk around with this stiff foot for six weeks. After a couple of days, while I do the washing up, I all of a sudden hear him chatting to himself while slouching in the sofa. He sometimes does that to pass the time, and, he has confided to me, because he sometimes feel that is the only way of having a meaningfull conversation. He might talk about a lot of stuff. This is the first time he has done this talking to himself for days. I am so happy to hear it again...Teo is back in business. He is daydreaming... again. He has some weird fantasies, this Teo:
"....though, if your TV- set is one of those old black/whites, you will see that Raquel Welch`s dress is white and grey........and in a moment we await the arrival of Anthony Hopkins........."

"Teo?", I say..." you`d like a piece of cheese, wouldn`t you?"

There was initially a moral to this story, but it mysteriously disappeared along the way